This is what Elon Musk wants to do with the DNA of all humanity
On the Tesla CEO’s favorite social network, a small discussion was started by an Italian astrophysicist who revealed human genome variants in volumes.
Antonio Regalado, Senior Editor at MIT Technology Review, joined that tweet musk Asking about the storage size of a single human genome could end up being on the order of 100 gigabytes.
For example, the size of the human genome is 3.3 gigabytes. HIV is only 9.7 kb. The largest known virus genome is 2.47 Mb (Pandoravirus salinus). The largest known genome of vertebrates is 130 Gb (the Marbled fish). The largest known plant genome is 150 Gb (Paris japonica) https://t.co/BhSYhMtp1U pic.twitter.com/idTxcAeooL
– Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) 25 May 2022
For this, the Tesla CEO noted that one could “fit the DNA sequences of all humans alive today into a fairly small data storage system,” an idea that would carry more weight if it came from the world’s richest man.
The difference in any two human genomes – yours for reference – might be on the order of about 50 million base pairs…stored as 10MB? So one form of pressure is just the differences.
– Antonio Regalado (@antonioregalado) 25 May 2022
[Tesla: Elon Musk dice que en un año sus vehículos serán totalmente autónomos]
The Human Genetic Code Project
The Human Genome Project (HGP) was an international scientific research project with the primary objective of determining the sequences of the chemical base pairs that make up DNA and identifying and mapping all the genes of the normal human genome from a physical and biological point of view. functional, including both protein-coding genes and non-protein-coding genes.
Scientists of this project Announced in 2003 Breakthrough: They sequenced the entire human reference genome, including the letter’s three billion DNA, a scientific undertaking compared at the time to landing astronauts on the Moon.
While the reference genome has come under fire recently, with scientists adding more than two million additional variants, it still doesn’t require much space to store the entire sequence on a conventional computer.
It is with this background in the scientific discussion that Musk’s words take special interest, especially if we consider the research conducted by one of his companies, Neuralink
To implement Musk’s idea, it will be necessary to develop a method for sequencing the DNA of all of humanity, which is unprecedented in science today.
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