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Researchers explain that the markers cannot be of the microbial origin because they were chosen to only stain DNA in dead cells, and that those markers were highly concentrated at where DNAs would originally have been before the death. So assuming no other obvious mistakes, there may be short (6+ bp) but still readable DNA strands in the fossil.


That's so short though that it isn't really useful. It would be like piecing together a book given syllables.


Yeah, 6 bp would be too short to be useful. But something like 50 bp would be much more useful, and haven't yet been exactly precluded.




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