Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Why you should not commit a crime!

While doing research for my molecular genetics class, I came across the following paper:
http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S0074-02762006000900021&script=sci_arttext

Or in more scientific terms

Do Vale Gomes, A., F.L. Melo, R.P. Werkhauser, and F.G.C. Abath. 2006. Development of a real time polymerase chain reaction for quantitation of Schistosoma mansoni DNA. Memorias do Instituto Oswaldo Crus (101).

Anyway, the point of the paper was that they were able to isolate a sample of 10fg! Yes, that's 10 femto-grams, 10^-15 g, or 0.0000000000000010 g of DNA, or about 2% of the DNA from a single cell! Yeah so it was from a parasite--Humans have way more DNA than a parasite and if they can sequence a worm they can certainly sequence a crook.

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