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by dragonwriter 2451 days ago
> DNA is immutable,

Well, no, it's absolutely not. Nor is it necessarily consistent within an individual.

1 comments

Yes, once you get into the particulars of molecular biology you're correct.

I made a comment about V(D)J recombination just the other day:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21053657

There's barr bodies, chimerism, all kinds of mutation - missense, nonsense, point deletes, repeats -, there's somatic recombination, slipping of strands, transposomes, polyploidy... you name it.

But I think talking at this level ignores the science and overwhelming statistics of SNP databases. You're not going to move around within the database over time.