Hi everyone!
I was just reading about bioinformatics and how we, as humanity have progressed from the Human Genome Project ( started in 1990) to developing low cost, precise and (comparatively) easy to use machines for gene sequencing. Gene Sequencing is basically finding out the sequence of all DNA/ nucleotides of a cell.
The average human genome, has about 2.9 billion base pairs (haploid), which correspond to a maximum of about 725 megabytes of data. Just imagine for a second. The entire code to create a human cell. The whole recipe can be on a DVD! Even more amazing is the fact that all of this information is freely available. The National Centre for Biotechnological Information (NCBI, USA) has an extensive database of almost all the organisms ever sequenced in the public domain. I can access it. You can too! Just put NCBI on your web search. Whole world is at your fingertips!
Until next time!
Vatsal