3 ms·
This statement doesn't make much sense to me. Is there a theoretical limit to the length of DNA, or do you mean that human DNA is ~100MB? The human genome is a
by ejolto 6y ago
This statement doesn't make much sense to me. Is there a theoretical limit to the length of DNA, or do you mean that human DNA is ~100MB?
The human genome is about 6.4 billion base pairs, where each base pair is represented by the letters: Adenine (A), Thymine (T), Cytosine (C), and Guanine (G), i.e. 2-bits. 6,4 billion is then 6.4E9*2 = 1.28E10 bits = 1.28E10/8 bytes = 1600 MB. Or 800 MB if you count the bases as pairs of two.
Polychaos dubium's DNA is over 200 times as long as human DNA[0].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polychaos_dubium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polychaos_dubium
- The_rationalist 6y agoI obviously meant human DNA. Thanks for doing the calculus however given that less than 1% of DNA actually has a coding role then it means that a human can be usefully encoded in 8MB.