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Comment by daemonk | Hacker News Reader

I'd never thought they would actually assemble this genome. But put together the father of string-graph assembly (Eugene Myers) and a shitload of money (PacBio reads), and you get an assembly of a 32gb genome.

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I just looked up how large the human genome is in bits (when the 4 bases are packed into 2 bits per base) the size of our genome is about 770MB.

Is the Axolotl's genome really 42.5 times larger than ours?

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.

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

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.

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...

Wait until you hear the genome size of an onion (~16 billion base pairs, compared to human ~3 billion base pairs)

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