(Untitled)

[mmays]

"A yottabyte exactly is 2 to the 80th power in bytes; 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 bytes.

A yottabyte is also equal to 1024 zettabytes.

With a hundred trillion cells, each one storing 6GB of data in its DNA, the body of a typical living animal stores a grand total of 600YB, making it the world's most redundant storage device."--Wikipedia: Read more... )

Comments

[txcaress]

heh, in your dreaaaaams

[pseudemys]

Keep in mind that the vast majority of the information hoarded in the sequence of our genomes is complete gibberish from the cell's point of view. More than forty percent of it consists of repetitive satellite sequences and dead insertion elements. Another good chuck of the genome consists of pseudogenes; duplicates of functional genes that have been so riddled with mutations that they no longer produce a functional product, but still resemble the genes from which they were duplicated. Less than one percent of the information stored in human DNA is actually useful, insofar as we can tell. The parts of your DNA that actually do contain useful information are usually interrupted by introns - segments of non-coding DNA interspersed within a segment of coding DNA. Imagine reading a 250 page novel with about 1500 pages of advertising scattered throughout. That's what it's like for the cell when it tries to make a functional product out of a gene.

[mmays]

Wow. No wonder you're so messed up in the head!
A HA HA!

No, but seriously, that was a fascinating bit of information. I shall file it under "Picture of A Modern Deoxyribonucleic Acid Strand", by B. Budke, in watercolor and SNOT.

250-page novel with 1500 pages of advertising? So the typical DNA strand is not unlike the Internet then, huh?

[pseudemys]

"So the typical DNA strand is not unlike the Internet then, huh?"

Quite right, in fact you can even think of a human chromosome as being full of pop-ups (introns), spyware (transposable elements), and of course, worms and trojans (integrated viral DNA).