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Can DNA be extracted from Oil?

sorgoth

Muse
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Aug 9, 2002
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I was just thinking about how oil is organic matter, deep in the earth, decomposed, ect. when I wondered: Would there be a way to tell what life the oil came from? What species, specifically?
 
Interesting question! Probably not; high pressure and high temperatures and hundreds of millions of years are each bad news for complex, fragile structures like DNA, - and in combination, well ...:(

BTW some researchers recently found they could extract DNA from permafrost soil samples. Some of these are quite ancient, but not as ancient as oil. Also, deep freeze keeps them preserved.

But surely, somebody will eventually test it.

Hans
 
No.

Oil is simply a mix of hydrocarbons which range from heavy (like bitumen) to light (methane). As such it can be manufactured from the raw materials, hydrogen, oxygen and carbon.

There is no DNA in oil, the organisms which produced it having long ago decayed away.
 
Diamond said:
No.

Oil is simply a mix of hydrocarbons which range from heavy (like bitumen) to light (methane). As such it can be manufactured from the raw materials, hydrogen, oxygen and carbon.

There is no DNA in oil, the organisms which produced it having long ago decayed away.
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The hydrocarbons you mention are for sure the main constituents of crude oil, but ther's other stuff in there, things we usually consider as impurities, and in theory some of these could be traces of the organisms that presumably were the source of the oil. However, I agree that DNA is a very unlikely find.

Hans
 
How sad that we run our cars and heat our homes using the remains of decayed lifeforms. It's like desecrating a giant tomb. :)
 
Well, not really from the oil but.........

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/...ist_uids=12197947&dopt=Abstract&holding=f1000

Microorganisms inhabiting subterranean oil fields have recently attracted much attention. Since intact groundwater can easily be obtained from the bottom of underground oil-storage cavities without contamination by surface water, studies on such oil-storage cavities are expected to provide valuable information to understand microbial ecology of subterranean oil fields. RESULTS: DNA was extracted from the groundwater obtained from an oil-storage cavity situated at Kuji in Iwate, Japan, and 16S rRNA gene (16S rDNA) fragments were amplified by PCR using combinations of universal and Bacteria-specific primers. The sequence analysis of 154 clones produced 31 different bacterial sequence types (a unique clone or group of clones with sequence similarity of > 98). etc etc
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Mind you, there are bugs that live on crude oil so the answer may be yes but not in the way you want.
 
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