It's possible that transformation by degraded DNA is important in bacterial evolution, he added, but it will be difficult to show just how often this occurs in nature. Redfield pointed out that the study found the rates of natural transformation of short fragments of DNA to be very low, close to the frequencies of random mutations. Overballe-Petersen said the process is akin to rummaging through the garbage can. Sometimes the bacteria will get cut by a piece of broken glass, but “once in a while, you'll strike gold.”