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From: werner@aecom.UUCP
Newsgroups: sci.bio
Subject: Re: question
Message-ID: <978@aecom.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 28-Mar-87 01:25:16 EST
Article-I.D.: aecom.978
Posted: Sat Mar 28 01:25:16 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 29-Mar-87 07:26:14 EST
References: <11189@teknowledge-vaxc.ARPA>
Organization: Albert Einstein Coll. of Med., NY
Lines: 28

In article <11189@teknowledge-vaxc.ARPA>, rburns@teknowledge-vaxc.ARPA (Randy Burns) writes:
> I was wondering roughly how many 'bytes' of information are contained
> within human chromosomes?

	The human genome contain 3 * 10^9 base pairs, which is 1000
times as much as that of Escherichia coli, and about 300 times the
total of all published sequences to date (*).
	Much of that is repeated DNA, either satellite DNA, interspersed
repeats, or moderately repeated gene families (like ribosomal RNA).

	Hence, if a byte is a base pair, that's your answer, although
only two bits are required to specify a base, ergo a 'byte' could 
actually be a tetranucleotide, but most sequences are stored as
letters (ATCG). 
	Similarly, if information is the key phrase here, only about
10-20% of the genome encodes information, so that brings the total
storage requirements down from 3000 Mbp to 300-600Mbp, maybe even
less.

(*) Latest release of Genbank contains 10,913 sequences from 13,774
publications, totalling 10,961,365 base pairs.


-- 
			      Craig Werner (MD/PhD '91)
				!philabs!aecom!werner
              (1935-14E Eastchester Rd., Bronx NY 10461, 212-931-2517)
                   "Viruses do to cells what Groucho did to Freedonia."