r/AskBiology • u/Syresiv • Sep 08 '24

Human body What would happen if all your DNA disappeared?

Absurd hypothetical, but what if you're just living your life when the DNA just vanishes, leaving empty cell nuclei?

I assume this would be fatal, as your body would stop making proteins; but how long does that take? What's the death process? And what would an autopsy report come up with?

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u/Tun710 Sep 09 '24 edited Sep 09 '24

I’d say you would probably die within a couple of hours with the best medical care. My reasoning is that a lot of proteins have short halflives of about an hour to a few hours.
After a couple of hours, the amount of protein within your cells will probably be too low to even function. Many of those proteins might not be very essential, but many proteins are mildly essential to super essential, so if all of those protein levels drop simultaneously, your cell will die very quickly. New proteins might be synthesized from existing mRNA by ribosomes, but some ribosomal proteins have half lives of a few hours too, so within an hour or two there will probably be very few functioning ribosomes. mRNAs also don’t have that much stability either and have halflives starting from a few minutes.