How did they calculate a single sperm to have 37 megabytes of information?
In: Biology
Other posters here have arguably gone beyond the age limit for this sub and have also mixed up “information” and “data”. Sperm cells carry DNA, which, strictly speaking, does *not* carry information, but rather is a memory molecule, and therefore contains data. Information arises when algorithms in the DNA are put to use. This is exactly how code written by humans is stored as data and information only emerges when the code is run (for those older than 5, this is because information is a thermodynamic quantity and requires heat dissipation). To estimate how much data a sperm cell carries, researchers looked at how much DNA is inside and estimated the space required to store it. I cannot find any source for the 37 Mb number, but I’m pretty sure that it simply comes from looking at how much space a FASTA file (a string of letters representing nucleotide bases) of the DNA sequence inside a sperm cell takes up in computer memory. This is why their number is neither 4 nor 400 Mb as cited by other users: these numbers are measures of information and not data storage, so their calculations include things like compression and algorithmic complexity, which are difficult to interpret for biological systems.
Source: am a PhD student studying information in biological systems.
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