This always blows my mind. We are currently breathing in the DNA of the trees, animals, and people around us—and we’re leaving ours behind for them, too. We’re all one big genetic soup.
This always blows my mind. We are currently breathing in the DNA of the trees, animals, and people around us—and we’re leaving ours behind for them, too. We’re all one big genetic soup.
"Soup" is a good word. Pieces of DNA resulting from destruction by nucleases and other enzymes.
The immune system destroy all the DNA in unexpected places in case it's a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viroid or something. Better safe than sorry.
One of the important steps in mRNA vaccines was to surround the mRNA with a lipid to ensure it can survive long enough to enter a cell. Naked mRNA would not have worked.
One has to wonder whether destroy is all it does though. Analyzing this as cues about the surroundings seems like it could be pretty useful for successful living, and something evolution could well pick up on. Will we find eventually that some of those nucleic acid fragments were being hauled off for identification in something like an extra inner sense of smell?
Not just rna, but dna as well.
> This always blows my mind. We are currently breathing in the DNA of the trees,
At this time of year, believe me, I am aware of the inhaled tree DNA setting off my pollen allergies.