Using a computer code and four bottles of chemicals, Venter's lab creates the largest man-made DNA structure by synthesizing and assembling the 582,970-base-pair genome of a bacterium.

The researchers found that the polarization was a strong function of the length of the DNA strands – with 80 base-pair-long strands giving 60% polarization but 25 base pairs only yielding about 10%.

They sequenced a 368 base pair fragment from the mitochrondrial genome and then compared it to sequences from ancient dogs, as well as to sequences from modern dogs, wolves, and coyotes.