I watched a documentary on Netflix yesterday that tried to explain DNA. In the documentary it was said that if you wrote down the amount of information of the dna in a single cell, you would need a million pages with 12,800 letters each.
But I somehow can't imagine that, how can you put something abstract in letters? Or do I somehow have a mistake in thinking.
Wish you all a nice weekend
And stays healthy
It is even common practice to reproduce DNA sequences with a letter code. One uses the four letters A, T, G and C, which stand for the four different nucleic bases, which can be part of a single building block of DNA, a nucleotide.
The human genome contains approximately 3.2 billion letters. If you put 12,800 letters on a page, you would only need 250,000 pages to map the entire human genome.
Since we humans have a double set of chromosomes (one version each from mother and father), the number can also be doubled to 500,000 pages. You only get a million if you would also write the complementary strands (the DNA forms a double helix). However, this is actually nonsensical because the complementary strand does not contain any additional information, but the base sequence of one strand results directly from the other. It's like adding the same thing to the first 500,000 pages, only this time in mirror writing.
The really crazy thing is that most of the DNA doesn't contain any useful information. Most of the DNA either has no function at all or is used, for example, as a genetic raw material or as a structural element like the telomeres.
The information that builds up your body is contained in only 20,000 genes, which contain an average of 30,000 nucleotides, which corresponds to 600,000,000 nucleotides or almost 19% of the entire genome. But even the largest part of a gene is not translated into a protein, only sections of it, the exons, which together make up an average of 1,000 nucleotides per gene.
With 20,000 genes, this would mean that the meaningful information that is actually contained in human DNA only comprises 20,000,000 letters and would therefore fit on a good 1,500 pages. The whole thing is of course just a rough estimate.
