4 ms·

Well, this doesn't really get at the heart of the article (or the matter), but to be rather pedantic, the virus genome encodes much more than just 3.2KB. Keep i

Well, this doesn't really get at the heart of the article (or the matter), but to be rather pedantic, the virus genome encodes much more than just 3.2KB. Keep in mind that most of what the genome accomplishes is done with proteins. In that case, you have to take codons (sets of 3 bases) and convert to one of the 20 amino acids. This effectively takes 64 bits of information and reduces it to 20... EXCEPT that proteins are 3-dimensional entities. Their exact 3D configuration is encoded in the amino acid sequence encoded by the DNA. We still don't fully understand how this encoding works, but it is, in effect, the most awesome compression algorithm imaginable!

sketerpot 17y ago
There's some redundancy in the mapping of codons to amino acids. Some of the most common point mutations will cause a codon to map to the same amino acid, or a functionally similar one. That's some information that would be lost if you represented DNA as an amino acid sequence.
Robin_Message 17y ago
(Disclaimer: I am not a biologist) DNA can only have four bases (ACGT), so each DNA base can only encode 2 bits of information. 20 amino acids could be encoded in 4 and a bit bits, not 20 bits (actually, you need a stop code, so 21 codes are needed). As it is, DNA uses 3 bases, 6 bits to encode each amino acid, so there is a little redundancy. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_code#RNA_codon_table http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_code#RNA_codon_table for the mapping. Proteins are 3D entities, but their shape is determined by the amino acids, which are determined by the DNA - so there is no awesome compression here. To put it another way, the words "booktitle:Dune" encode a novel, which is much more than 14 bytes, but I cannot encode any arbitrary stream of bytes in this way.

4 ms·

Well, this doesn't really get at the heart of the article (or the matter), but to be rather pedantic, the virus genome encodes much more than just 3.2KB. Keep i

by jballanc 17y ago

sketerpot 17y ago
There's some redundancy in the mapping of codons to amino acids. Some of the most common point mutations will cause a codon to map to the same amino acid, or a functionally similar one. That's some information that would be lost if you represented DNA as an amino acid sequence.
Robin_Message 17y ago
(Disclaimer: I am not a biologist) DNA can only have four bases (ACGT), so each DNA base can only encode 2 bits of information. 20 amino acids could be encoded in 4 and a bit bits, not 20 bits (actually, you need a stop code, so 21 codes are needed). As it is, DNA uses 3 bases, 6 bits to encode each amino acid, so there is a little redundancy. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_code#RNA_codon_table http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_code#RNA_codon_table for the mapping. Proteins are 3D entities, but their shape is determined by the amino acids, which are determined by the DNA - so there is no awesome compression here. To put it another way, the words "booktitle:Dune" encode a novel, which is much more than 14 bytes, but I cannot encode any arbitrary stream of bytes in this way.