Compressing Your DNA

Apparently, 2006 saw the digital universe pass 160 billion gigabytes (that’s 160 exabytes, for more on the exa prefix and its congeners check out this sciencebase article). That’s an awfully large number of digital photos, mp3 files, documents, and other digital info, to say the least. EMC recently pronounced on the future of digital information and predicted that 2010 would see a staggering 988 billion gigabytes of digital created information. Why they said 988 and not just a 1000, which would be 1000 exabytes (or 1 zettabyte, it’s those prefixes again!), I don’t know.

You would imagine that this quantity of data would be nothing compared to, say, the information encoded in the human genome. However, DNA just does not compare. According to Google founder Larry Page, who knows all about data, information, and the problems we face in creating, storing, and searching all this information, reckons the human genome could be compressed to just 600 megabytes (that’s several orders of magnitude less than all the digital data on the net, for instance). In fact, compressed you could fit all the information encoded in every cell in your body on to a single CD-R disk. Now, that’s a significant thought.

That said, the scale of complexity of the human brain is a different matter. While it may not feel like there is much room left for storage up there, especially the proverbial morning after the night before, the human brain has an estimated 10¹³ to 10¹⁵ synapses or connections between brain cells. If each synapse can “store” hypothetically a byte of date, that’s an awful lot of storage space. Of course, the brain is not a giant chunk of wetware DRAM, it is far more complicated than that, although chip speed between individuals varies enormously as we know.