The Future of DNA

The deep freeze of glacial ice seemed like the only place where DNA might stand a chance of surviving more or less intact for thousands of years. Willerslev's graduate research focused on microbes that had been trapped in ice sheets between 2000 and 4000 years ago. Over time, DNA outside of cells becomes damaged. For example, it gets broken down into tiny fragments which become riddled with errors from nucleotide base pair substitutions. This further garbles whatever information it had encoded.