Loren walked over, picked up the folder, and turned to the first page.
Alice's report was remarkably detailed, covering everything from the cellular changes Skrulls underwent when shapeshifting to the mechanisms that regulated their gene expression.
Every step was backed by data and theoretical analysis. Loren turned the pages one by one, his eyes growing brighter.
"Genetic plasticity. The Skrull genome contains a highly repetitive sequence.
During shapeshifting, this sequence undergoes structural reorganization, rearranging the order of its base pairs to produce different proteins.
This rearrangement isn't random. It's regulated by a Morphology Control Gene located on chromosome 23.
The product of this gene is a specialized enzyme that can identify the physical features of a target organism and convert them into genetic instructions."
He stopped and closed the folder.
Skrull genes weren't fixed.
They could rearrange themselves during shapeshifting, like a living book whose every page could be rewritten as needed.
That plasticity meant Skrull genes had an extraordinarily high tolerance for foreign genetic information.
It wasn't that they "didn't reject" it. They didn't recognize anything as something to reject.
To Skrull cells, any gene was acceptable, because their own genes were constantly changing.
Loren paced around the laboratory, his fingers absently tracing circles in the air.
If he could extract the mechanism behind that genetic plasticity from a Skrull and apply it to the fusion of human cells and Kryptonian genes...
A Skrull cell wouldn't reject Kryptonian genes, because it was already accustomed to accepting new genetic information.
So what if he temporarily turned a human cell into a Skrull cell?
Then introduced Kryptonian genes while it was in that state.
Let the fusion happen inside the Skrull cellular environment, then turn the fused cell back into a human cell...
He stopped walking.
The idea could work.
But