From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Thu May 09 2002 - 02:41:53 MDT
On Thu, 9 May 2002, Damien Broderick wrote:
> Weeelll... a very quick glance at
>
> http://www.nationalacademies.org/ssb/nanopanel2.htm
>
> shows this discussion summary:
>
[snip]
> Olavi Kajander is not mocked and hounded from the room.
No, 200 nm is not out of the question since that may be
in the size range of the diameter (though not the length)
of spirochetes or a very minimal mycoplasma genome.
But 20 nm (as the company claims) is way below the limit
of DNA bending limits (as the NAS papers point out) so
one has to be working with an entirely different underlying
principle as a genetic information carrier if you want to
assert organisms that small.
Anyone want to place bets on the corporation's reaction to
my requesting they add links to the NAS paper documenting
that you simply cannot have organisms 20 nm in size based
on known DNA/RNA models?
Its not like this is a "recent" discovery. The principles
for the isolation of DNA/RNA have been known for decades.
If nanobacteria do not have published data for the conserved
sequences (such as the 35S RNA) then they are either such
a radically different branch of life that existing molecular
biology methods are useless or the scientists working in these
areas are relatively incompetent.
Robert
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