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Re:Axolotl Genome Slowly Yields Secrets of Limb Regrowth by stochastic_monk on Thursday July 05, 2018 @10:58PM (#17468542)
3 billion bp in a haploid human genome, 6 billion in a full diploid one. If you store the masked/unknown/variable ranges as annotations on the side, you can get away with close to 2 bits per base, as you suggested.

The axolotl haploid genome is 32 Gbp, which, in 2-bit encoding and ignoring masked bases, takes 8GB to store.

Axolotl, like humans, is diploid, meaning it has 2 copies of each chromosome.

That’s only about 10 times the size of the human genome. That being said, the complexity of a genome doesn’t scale with size. Many plant genomes are gargantuan but highly repetitive. The Kolmogorov complexity of a genome would better predict the complexity of the organism than a genome’s length would.

Re:Axolotl Genome Slowly Yields Secrets of Limb Regrowth by raverbashing on Friday July 06, 2018 @05:49AM (#17470144)
I wonder how that competes with the latest generation of Flash memory in terms of (physical) storage size and mass.

Though storage capacity is growing, it seems DNA still wins by some margin though

Re:Axolotl Genome Slowly Yields Secrets of Limb Regrowth by Thiez on Friday July 06, 2018 @06:59AM (#17470412)
Flash memory has considerably better read/write speeds. It can also be read electronically instead of chemically. I don't think it makes sense to compare them.
Re:Axolotl Genome Slowly Yields Secrets of Limb Regrowth by stochastic_monk on Friday July 06, 2018 @11:48AM (#17472378)
It’s also error-prone. That being said, research in the area has been ongoing for years. For example, see [0].

[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/01/mp3-files-written-as...