Real Dirt and Magnetic Particles

[Green_Elite_Cab]

Hah... All this talk about critters makes me think about extremophiles. Those little microscopic organisms that survive, nay, thrive in the deep ocean under enormous pressure, in total darkness and huddle around volcanic vents in the ocean floor. Just recently they also found a life form on the Earth that survives on Arsenic! Crazy...ain't Life grand!

those thermophiles make modern science possible. You know those hot springs in yellow stone? They actually form goey jelly-like clumps of bacteria in them. These creatures have enzymes and such that can survive at incredible temperatures.

It makes processes like PCR (polymerase Chain Reaction) efficient and realistic. Basically, PCR copies DNA, so if you needed alot of DNA, and you only have a small sample, you would use PCR to scale up your amount. This involves "unzippering" the DNA with heat, then adding more nucleotides (the building blocks of DNA), cooling it down, and then "zippering" them up again with an enzyme called DNA Polymerase. Then repeat the cycle. This causes 1 DNA strand to become 2, then 2 becomes 4, and so on exponentially.

The only problem is that DNA "unzippers" at somewhere around 90 degrees Celsius (190 degrees Fahrenheit)! This is so hot that most "normal" DNA Polymerase enzymes would have been permanently destroyed (Denatured), and you would need to add more polymerase every cycle. However, if we borrow DNA polymerase from thermophiles, it can survive that heat. We call it Taq polymerase, and it allows us to simply put our PCR machine in a programmed heating -cooling cycle that creates incredible amounts of DNA from a small sample in a very short time, very efficiently. Taq polymerase comes from "Thermus AQuaticus", originally discovered in Yellowstone in the 1960s.

This is how a single hair or trace DNA sample from a crime scene can be realistically analyzed. they simply put it through PCR, and what was once a small amount of evidence is now limitless.

but yeah, back to the discussion of trains!