So what I was asking them to do out in nature in an hour was to actually take up this radioactive phosphate and then resynthesize nucleotides with it and then get into DNA. Which then starts to bring up an interesting issue: how fast do organisms make DNA in nature, how fast do they make nucleotides? We're doing a little bit of this work and probably will be doing more of it. Again, that's another sort of area where all the mechanisms are worked out, all I had to do is look this up in a biochemistry book thank goodness, because I'm not a biochemist. But then the question is how fast does this really occur outside. We're not talking about some strain of e.coli. What happens with the proverbial blade of grass or whatever else is out there. What's really happening because this is what we're going to get into here.

So, once it's incorporating the DNA we isolate its sort of rate curve, and it turns out that what happens is--I'm going to give you three examples: the Lyngbya mat goes with this cyanobacteria that lives in the inter-tidal; green-looking-alga, which is really a red alga and Zygogonium, which is really the green alga. Here on this axis which gives the time of day, and I carefully put noon in the middle so it's really easy to spot. And then we've got midnight, 6:00 a.m., noon, and then 6:00 p.m. And what you see in all cases of the exposed set of organisms, the sun comes up and DNA synthesis needs to come up, there's a dip in the afternoon, another peak, and later in the afternoon and evening and then it goes way back down over the relative heights and the peaks and so on.

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