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Burn your genes on CD -- for $500,000

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the put-that-on-gnutella dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Venter says he plans to offer the service, with the goal of burning individual human's entire DNA sequences onto shiny compact discs. It will cost about $500,000 per person, says the entrepreneurial scientist who helped decode the human genome. "

3 of 276 comments (clear)

  1. Oh, the price has gone down. by titurel · · Score: 3, Informative

    From this first post: "Craig Venter, Time Magazine's Person of the Year in 2000 has a new hobby: collecting rich people's DNA. Millionaires are lining up to buy their personal gene maps for the cool price of USD$621,500."

  2. Re:how big is the entire genome? by treat · · Score: 5, Informative
    ike, is it 1 cd(i find it hard to believe, but not that hard) or 30? 1000?

    This website says that we have about 3 billion base pairs, 30 thousand of which are genes (the rest is the mysterious "junk dna"). There are 4 base pairs, therefore each base pair is 2 bits of data. That's about 7.5kb for all the genes, and 715MB for every base pair - which after compression should fit comfortably on a standard CD.

  3. Re:how big is the entire genome? by the+gnat · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yes and no. I just tried gzipping chromosome 22 (one of the smallest) - it goes from 35MB to 10MB. The entire genome is about 3.5GB. However, keep in mind that the repetition isn't perfect, because from what I understand repeat motifs are more like regex's than simply the same sequence over and over again. A custom compression scheme could probably do much better than gzip.