Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Absolutely dead wrong. It's 2.5Gb, where Gb = Gigabases. Learn you a genomics, son.

https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v420/n6915/full/nature...




There are four bases, so one base encodes two bits of information. Eight bits are one byte, so four bases are one byte. 2500 megabases = 625 megabytes. So yeah, Parent was off by a factor of 5-6 :) . But still, that fits on one CD.


Except that currently genomics requires even more information to be encoded - such as quality scores, allele frequencies, phase information, ... - so, depending on the format, this estimate is off by either one or two orders of magnitude still.


No need for being rude.


I read that last line as funny / tongue-in-cheek, as if every normal person learns their ATGC's as easily as their ABC's :-D




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: