How did they calculate a single sperm to have 37 megabytes of information?
In: Biology
There is 4 possible nucleotide of each location in our DNA. 2 alternatives can be represented by 2 bits there is 8 bits in a byte so 4 base pair per byte. The human genome is around 3.2 billion base pairs 3 200 000 000/4= 800 000 000 = 800 MB.
So to get to 37 MB you either only include the protein-coding part of the DNA. The other alternative is you use the number that you could get if you compressed the data in some way. Because human DNA is very close to other human DNA you can losslessly compress to roughly 4 megabytes.
So if sperm contains 37 megabytes of information depending on what you mean by information. You can have values of 800 MB to 4 MB depending on how you look at it.
What information is not an easy question. What is the amount of data in the string “aaaaaaaaaa”? you could compress it to 10a and you have reduced if from 10 to 3 characters but no information loss.
EDIT: Missed that the number was for a haploid genome and a 3->4 mixup.
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