Though Obelisks have a sort of grand structure (thus their name), their genetic sequences only consist of around 1,000 nucleotides. In comparison, a typical human DNA structure is made up of around 3 billion nucleotides. The small and precise nature of these tiny “things” is likely why they have gone undiscovered for so long.
When Zheludev and his research team took this new RNA structure and searched more than 5 million datasets of published genetic sequences, they found that there were nearly 30,000 different Obelisks present in the samples.