“It's been an assumption that short, degraded DNA is not relevant” to natural transformation, said Søren Overballe-Petersen, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen and the study’s lead author. But longer fragments—say, a kilobase in length—don't last very long in the environment, limiting the opportunities for bacteria to take them in. Shorter stretches of DNA, however—tens of base pairs (bp) long—can persist for hundreds of thousands of years. The researchers wanted to see whether these, too, might have some relevance in natural transformation.“What are the odds of nothing happening?” asked Overballe-Petersen.