Full genome sequencing.

[vlad777]

Why do they say on wikipedia that it takes enormous amount
of memory to save entire genome of one human?

I seem to be confused ,you will forgive my ignorance and please correct me.

So they say there's 6 billion base pairs. They only come in two combinations.
AT -0 , CG-1.

So for 6 billion we need 6G*8b *(1/8 B/b) = 750 MB // This is possibley wrong. Why?

 

[3v0]

From Article - Human Genome which agrees with your number.

In order to represent a DNA sequence on a computer we would need to be able to represent all 4 base pair possibilities in binary form. This can be done using a minimum of 2 bits, which yields 4 different bit combinations (00, 01, 10, and 11). Each 2 bit combination would represent one DNA sequence. A single byte (or 8 bits) can represent 4 DNA sequences. In order to store the entire human genome on a computer without compression would require around 3,000,000,000 / 4 = 750,000,000 bytes of storage or 750 megabytes.

 

[tcmtech]

So by todays standards of storage capacity thats roughly one CD.

30 years ago that was something but now with multi Ter hard drives becoming common its not such a big deal.

 

[RMMM]

My first HD was 32MB and cost $360us.

At $30 a megabyte that is a lot of space.

A little earlier: The first I used was $120 a MB. The 10MB harddrives for LT Colonel was $1200 in the late 1980s

So, 750MB back then would be around $90,000 dollars at $120 a MB

Earlier still: Remember LISA from Apple? It had 1MB of memory and that cost $3000 dollars.

Then, a 750MB of memory (Not nessisarily HD, but RAM) would have cost $2,250,000 Million.

The thing is imagine READING through 750MB of TEXT with only 4 letters and trying to find particularities.

Or printing it!