How much information is in DNA?
15 comments
·May 8, 2025tetris11
I thought the main advantage of DNA storage was the physical size of it, and how many different genomes you could have stacked next to each other in the same -70degree space.
Millions of chimeric cells on the same petri dish? That's 1PB on a single glass slide.
Depending on the sequencing tech paired with the rise of Spatial data, the read speed could be formidable.
Needlessly complex setup though. Let's just stick with metals for now.
out_of_protocol
DNA self-desintegrate very fast. It only works in living cells because it is being repaired non-stop
throwanem
Even reading is a destructive process, and the physics involved are incomprehensibly complex by comparison with anything in the digital domain.
null
roxolotl
Discussion from earlier this week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43927321
Pretty sure the substack and main site are the same. First paragraph is at least.
nuc1e0n
The article says that DNA is designed to keep working despite mutations occuring. What evidence does the author put forward to suppose it was designed rather than evolved? There's plenty of evidence to support it evolved BTW.
iamtheworstdev
you might be reading a little too much into that word
decremental
[dead]
rhelz
In any case, 6.2 billion bits (interestingly enough, almost exactly as much information which is on an audio CD which you used for your romantic mixtapes) is an upper bound.
This rules out pretty much every nutty theory which evolutionary psychologists propose. Such as we evolved for altruism, we evolved to believe in religion, etc etc. Complete B.S. Exactly how much information would you need to specify a behavior like being predisposed to a belief in religion??? There's less than 80 minutes worth of music's worth of information in our genomes, and most of that is concerned with just keeping us alive.
You are not predisposed to be anything. Go create the kind of person you want to be.
out_of_protocol
> There's less than 80 minutes worth of music's worth of information
Or awful lot of text information (state of art compressors can do up to 1:10 ratio for plain text, decoder itself is rather small, 750MB compressed could potentially contain like 7GB of text data).
Also, look at demoscene. 4k (4 kB is the size of executable) can do crazy things, and 64kB can fit a lot of nice 3D objects, music, text, complex effects etc. weight less than any screenshot of any moment of running demo. In 95kB you can have full game (google kkringer)
P.S. better example: full snake game in 56 BYTES https://github.com/donno2048/snake
For comparation the link above is 34 bytes, whole sentence is 83 bytes. It's possible to do a lot if we're talking about code
Valgrim
There's an interesting implication to this. We assume that evolution happens when random mutations (similar to random bit flips, removal or injection?) occur and when the random result has an advantage, the mutation tends to remain in the gene pool.
Yet at the same time the result of this random code is extremely compressed, to the point we compare it to procedural generative code.
Not sure what we can do with this but it certainly seems like we can once again get inspired by nature on this one.
robviren
I'd argue you could even take that one step further. Limiting it to the data encoded by DNA does not take into account what it is interacting with. DNA interacts with an ocean of protein leading to untold numbers of interactions. The DNA could just be the operating system in all this calling upon RNA and other "devices" to execute functions.
To expand upon your compression idea, the index it is using exists outside the DNA encoding itself which means it could be holding an absolute ton of data.
Bonus: https://xkcd.com/3056/
ruuda
> There's less than 80 minutes worth of music's worth of information in our genomes
That’s a very misleading take, this is lossless audio and the majority of the bits are spent encoding noise. You can encode way more audio at perceptually but not technically lossless level in that space.
guilbep
There is no logic behind your argument
Information can only be defined with respect to states where you 1. Can tell (or could in theory tell) the difference and 2. Care about the difference between states. The differences you care about, and the ones you don't, are baked in whenever you use any definition of information.
It doesn't matter much, unless you use it to sneak in what you think we should care about, or use it to make philosophical arguments whose circularity is carefully hidden.