Comment Re:Not a very useful comparison (Score 1) 121
I seem to remember looking into this a while ago and the human genome isn't really as big as I thought it was. According to this nature page there are 3.4 billion base pairs and since each is only one of 4 values it takes 2-bits per base pair to encode so the entire genome is only 850,000,000 bytes which is 810.6MB (1,048,576 bytes/MB). I don't know about you but the cost to 'store' this in my mind is essentially nothing. There are a ton of places on the web that will easily offer 1GB of storage for free, 1GB USB sticks are frequently given away and if you buy a current HD (non-SSD) the cost of 1GB is less than $0.15.
I welcome the day when sequencing a genome costs less than $0.15...
I welcome the day when sequencing a genome costs less than $0.15...