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From: roy@phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith)
Newsgroups: sci.chem,sci.bio
Subject: Re: Blood and detecting "Pool P"
Message-ID: <1990Nov25.154239.17434@phri.nyu.edu>
Date: 25 Nov 90 15:42:39 GMT
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larry@kitty.UUCP (Larry Lippman) writes:
> I feel confident that 300-year old blood can be reliably identified *as
> blood*, I am highly doubtful that any species identification can be made.

	Would it be possible to recover enough DNA to do PCR on it?  I seem
to remember reading something about doing PCR on DNA from a frozen quagga
(a zebra-like beast which became extinct in the last ice age, now only
found on "rogue" games).  The quagga DNA was O(10,000) years old, which is
considerably older than 300 years, but perhaps freezing is a better method
of preserving than drying on paper?

	Assuming you could do PCR, how hard would it be to determine the
species?  The most likely other candidates would probably be some sort of
food animal, such as cow, pig, or chicken (or whatever animals they were
eating 300 years ago; the point is, other primates would be unlikely).
Actually, it just occurred to me that red blood cells don't have DNA, if I
remember correctly, but maybe some other component of blood does?

	Now, about "Pool P", everybody knows that the way to detect it is
to look for the warm spots. :-)
--
Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016
roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu -OR- {att,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy
"Arcane?  Did you say arcane?  It wouldn't be Unix if it wasn't arcane!"