How much storage would be required to store a human genome?

storage bioinformatics dna-sequence genetics
Milan Babuškov picture Milan Babuškov · Jan 21, 2012 · Viewed 79.9k times · Source

I'm looking for the amount of storage in bytes (MB, GB, TB, etc.) required to store a single human genome. I read a few articles on Wikipedia about DNA, chromosomes, base pairs, genes, and have some rough guess, but before disclosing anything I'd like to see how others would approach this issue.

An alternative question would be how many atoms are there in human DNA, but that would be off topic for this site.

I understand that this will be an approximation, so I'm looking for the minimal value that would be able to store DNA of any human.

Answer

Oliver Charlesworth picture Oliver Charlesworth · Jan 21, 2012

If you trust such things, here is what Wikipedia claims (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genome#Information_content):

The 2.9 billion base pairs of the haploid human genome correspond to a maximum of about 725 megabytes of data, since every base pair can be coded by 2 bits. Since individual genomes vary by less than 1% from each other, they can be losslessly compressed to roughly 4 megabytes.

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