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What We Can (and Can’t) Do With DNA
Jurassic Park—is a classic. If anyone hasn’t seen it, it’s about cloning dinosaurs to create a dinosaur theme park. Some might say that’s an ill-advised idea. We ask Steve, our in-house movie buff and expert geneticist, to get stuck in and answer the question, “How real is it?”
“Where do you get 100-million-year-old dinosaur DNA? Oh, Mr. DNA! From your blood! Just one drop of your blood contains…”
Mr. DNA is an absolutely brilliant explanation of DNA. I’ve given talks in schools where kids have asked me about him, saying how exciting it was and how much they learned about DNA from that scene. It’s a great introduction to how DNA functions within an organism.
The film explains: sometimes, after biting a dinosaur, a mosquito would land on a tree branch and get stuck in the sap. Over time, the sap fossilises—just like a dinosaur bone—preserving the mosquito inside.
How Real Is It?
It’s a fantastic idea. I absolutely love the concept of extracting dinosaur DNA from a mosquito. But in reality, it probably wouldn’t work very well. It’s hard enough to preserve DNA in a freezer, let alone inside a mosquito’s gut for 120 million years. DNA degrades rapidly, even if the mosquito is trapped in amber.
Can you get enough DNA from just a drop? Technically, yes—you can extract plenty of DNA from a single drop, as long as it’s high quality. But in this case, the chances of usable dinosaur DNA surviving that long are basically zero.
The scientists in Jurassic Park use sophisticated techniques to extract the preserved blood from the mosquito, but then they fill in the missing sequences with frog DNA.
Even today, more than 30 years after this film came out, we still couldn’t do this. But hey, it’s science fiction—it’s meant to be imaginative. That said, the idea of using frog DNA to fill in the gaps never made much sense to me. I think in the book, they use animals that are more closely related to dinosaurs, like chickens, which makes more sense.
In reality, trying to create a dinosaur from tiny fragments of degraded DNA—let alone mixing in frog DNA—would be an enormous challenge. But I’d love to believe it was possible. I’d love to see dinosaurs walking around again.
What This Means for Real-Life DNA Testing
While Jurassic Park is pure fiction, the idea of extracting DNA from old samples is very real. At AttoLife, we sometimes need to work with degraded DNA samples—though for legal cases, not dinosaurs!
Legal DNA testing often requires us to establish a familial connection, and sometimes, one of the individuals involved is deceased. This is particularly important in cases of inheritance or custody disputes, where you need to prove with a high degree of confidence that two people are related.
Post-Mortem DNA testing
Typically, when trying to prove a relationship, such as in a DNA paternity home test or even a cheap paternity test, a mouth swab is more than sufficient. Known as buccal swabs, they contain more than enough substance for paternity DNA testing in the uk.
However, buccal swabs are not always a viable option for post-mortem DNA testing because the DNA in these cells degrades very quickly after death leaving little usable material behind. While saliva contains DNA, most of it comes from cheek cells rather than the liquid itself, and after death, there’s no active shedding of cells, making it an unreliable source for testing.
So, in the case of the deceased, we turn to the hair and nails. Due to their Keratin composition, these take longer to degrade than soft tissue. Therefore, the DNA contained in these samples can still be of suitable quality for DNA testing for weeks, months or even longer after death. If the person has been deceased for a longer time, we may use blood or urine samples stored by a hospital or coroner.
DNA Testing for the Legal System
Unlike in Jurassic Park, where they try to rebuild dinosaurs from scraps of ancient DNA, our goal is to provide reliable, legally admissible results using the most accurate means available, whether that’s a buccal swab from a living person, or hair, nails, blood or urine from the deceased.
DNA technology has come a long way, but even today, working with older or degraded samples is a challenge. However, with the right techniques and expertise, we can still provide answers that make a real difference in people’s lives. You can learn more about legal DNA testing by watching our on-demand webinar, our checkout or legal DNA testing page below.