Printing the human genome on punched tape • Hacker News Board

Re: Printing the human genome on punched tape

#11

Post by Gatsky » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 10:53 PM UTC

curtis wrote: post #9

Seeing the piles of accumulated paper tape does actually illustrate an interesting question: How exactly is 3.2 billion base pairs of DNA folded up in a human cell?

Yes, it’s quite amazing, no less that the whole thing is constantly copied and repackaged, and remember there are 2 versions of your genome (one from mum one from dad) so it’s actually 6 billion base pairs. The 3 dimensional organisation of the genome is very important, it’s an active area of research.

Re: Printing the human genome on punched tape

#12

Post by mavhc » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 11:06 PM UTC

kyberias wrote: post #3

This is unbelievably wasteful and uninteresting.

Well, it is wasteful, everyone needs to be cutting down to 2kW of energy, from 4 in EU and 6 in N.America. Even then we'll need 70 times more nuclear power stations than we have today, and that's only for 50% of our energy needs, other 50% from renewables.

Re: Printing the human genome on punched tape

#13

Post by jacquesm » Sun, Mar 03, 2019, 12:20 AM UTC

curtis wrote: post #9

Seeing the piles of accumulated paper tape does actually illustrate an interesting question: How exactly is 3.2 billion base pairs of DNA folded up in a human cell?

Multiple stages of spiralwound loops.

https://slideplayer.com/slide/6324118/

Re: Printing the human genome on punched tape

#14

Post by Tomminn » Sun, Mar 03, 2019, 1:23 AM UTC

enriquto wrote: post #6

Tomminn wrote: post #5

I don't understand why he's not encoding information into the odd labelled columns. It really takes away from the project.

And using 8 bits to encode 2 is also a very strange choice.

That's not entirely true. There are also bits associated with ambiguous combinations of single base pairs, so there is actually 4 bits of information if all ambiguous combinations are possible. But it'd be much closer to 2 if you took into account how rare these are. Still, had he done exactly the same encoding without those column gaps between I wouldn't have criticized.

Re: Printing the human genome on punched tape

#15

Post by amingilani » Sun, Mar 03, 2019, 1:32 AM UTC

I'm really interested in the amount of paper this art project will use, and how much it'll weigh. He says " a cumulative length of some 5000 miles" but doesn't specify the paper so I can't calculate how many trees went into this. I'm not an extreme ecological conservationist, but this does come across as a huge waste for no real purpose.