Please excuse my terminology, for all intents and purposes, I am 5 years old.
[This post from AskReddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/u2ll98/whats_a_cool_fun_fact_that_you_know/i4jwtbe/) is confusing me. How exactly can a physical thing like DNA, be able to have an amount of digital size applied to it?
How do you correlate what I know of as a tiny tiny tiny little piece of my body, with a digital number given to the size of a program, or a hard drive, or a load of files?
In: 2
Imagine an alphabet with only 4 letters. that’s what DNA is. It’s a long chain of “nucleotides” or “bases” and there are 4 kinds. The sequence of those bases is how you encode information, just like spelling words. But since there are only 4 bases, you have to use groups of bases to spell anything useful. It takes 3 bases to form a useful “letter”.
Our cells use this to store instructions for how to make proteins. But you could, theoretically, store any kind of information in a DNA sequence.
So a group of researchers at Harvard managed to store information in DNA at a density of 700 terrabytes per gram of DNA.
But a gram of DNA is actually **A LOT** of DNA. a single human cell contains only 6 picograms of DNA, and that’s enough information to build a human.
so a gram of DNA is equivalent to the DNA from 1,000,000,000,000 cells.
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