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As someone with a very rudimentary understanding of biology, how much data are we talking about in terms of a DNA sequence? I.E. if we wanted to store a human's
by FractalParadigm 6y ago
As someone with a very rudimentary understanding of biology, how much data are we talking about in terms of a DNA sequence? I.E. if we wanted to store a human's complete set of DNA digitally, are we at a point where we can definitively say "this will take X GB of storage"?
- silleknarf 6y agoFrom elsewhere on the internet (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8954571/how-much-storage-would-be-required-to-store-a-human-genome https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8954571/how-much-storage...): "The 2.9 billion base pairs of the haploid human genome correspond to a maximum of about 725 megabytes of data, since every base pair can be coded by 2 bits. Since individual genomes vary by less than 1% from each other, they can be losslessly compressed to roughly 4 megabytes."
- MagnumOpus 6y agoA complete haploid human genome is 3 billion base pairs. One byte encodes four basepairs, so that's 750MB in total; and it losslessly compresses to less than half that amount. If you store more than one genome, any additional genome is only 4MB because human genomes are 99% identical. So you could store the genomes of an entire city on your hard drive.