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Genetic Database Hits One Billion Entries
ChocSnorfler writes to tell us that the Sanger Institute is reporting that their Genetic Record Database has hit one billion entries, making it the world's largest. From the announcement: "The Trace Archive is a store of all the sequence data produced and published by the world scientific community, including the Sanger Institute's own prodigious output as a world-leading genomics institution. To grasp how much data is in the Archive, if it were printed out as a single line of text, it would stretch around the world more than 250 times. Printing it out on pages of A4 would produce a stack of paper two-and-a-half times as high as Mount Everest. The Archive is 22 Terabytes in size and doubling every ten months."
Just as amazing is that there are only about 25,000 protein coding genes in the entire human genome (though obviously there are more proteins possible through splicing and post-translational modification, but I digress). Also amazing is the precision in which the chromosomes wind up all that DNA. Imagine taking a piece of yarn miles and miles long and compacting it into something that could fit into a paper bag - now imagine someone asking you to take out a VERY specific piece of that yarn and exposing it from your roll, disturbing the rest of the yarn as little as possible, then putting it back exactly as it was before when they're finished with it...that's basically what each chromosome has to do when genes are expressed. And it's all mediated by proteins coded in that very DNA.