Measuring Genetic Information

• The human genome contains three billion nucleotides (T, A, G, C)

• Reference points:

• • The Bible contains about 3.5 million letters
  • Encyclopedia Britannica online has about 300 million characters
  • A CD can store 650 million bytes (byte = 8 bits, bit = 0 or 1)
  • English Wikipedia has about 3.5 billion characters
  • A DVD can store 4.7 billion bytes

• The human genome has about the same amount of information as the English Wikipedia’s over 2,000 articles and about ten times that of the Encyclopedia Britannica!