It has been about 20 years since scientists created the first complete human reference genome that contained approximately 3 billion letters of DNA, but now some improvements are being suggested.
Over the years, the first complete human reference genome has been added, with approximately two million additional code variations included in the model. Now, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has been discussing how this model could be placed in a storage system, but on a much larger scale. Musk responded to a tweet that provided a graph about the size of a human genome in the data, which said that the human genome is 3.3 Gb in size, the HIV virus is only 9.7 kb in size, and the genome of known largest vertebrates is 130 Gb.
Antonio Regalado, senior editor of biomedicine for the MIT Technology Review, noted that the storage of a DNA sequence from the human genome is “more like 100 gigabytes” due to additional sequencing information. In addition, Musk speculated that with a “lossless compression delta” and “a few reference human genomes,” the DNA sequences of all living humans today could fit into a storage system. quite small data “.
While it certainly seems possible for all of humanity’s DNA sequences to fit into some sort of storage system, the question is not whether we can do it, but should we? Would everyone’s DNA storage be for the “good”?