How did they calculate a single sperm to have 37 megabytes of information?
In: Biology
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37Mbytes is low. Sperm are Haploid cells containing half a genome or about 3 billion base pairs. And depending upon how you consider the data to be stored that is about 375MB. 750 if you count both sides but since it doesn’t code for anything different, as far as we know, we can concentrate on just 1 side.
Here is that calculation 3,000,000,000 / 8 = 375,000,000
However its a false equivalency. Bytes are composed of binary digits only 0s and 1s thus a byte will get you the numbers 0 – 255. Where as in DNA you have 4 possible bases which are “read” in sets of 3 called Codons which code for amino acids. With 3 bases and 4 options per base a set of 3 gives you 64 options. However in most instances a certain amino acid can be coded for by 4 – 6 different Codons. Thus the possible number of amino acids are 21.
So if you divide 3,000,000,000 bases by 3 you are talking about 1,000,000,000 possible Codons or amino acids which in several various combinations make up proteins.
Since we can’t quantify the possibly infinite number of combinations possible it is not possible to know how much information is actually represented but it is definitely more than 37MB.
Even if we treated each base as a bit but with 4 states instead of 2 and tried to call them bytes by grouping them 8 at a time we still get the minimum 375MB.
But its like comparing apples and oranges and not a very useful number no matter which one you choose.
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