How much information is in DNA?

https://press.asimov.com/articles/dna-information This is an article that just appeared in Asimov Press, who kindly agreed that I could publish it here and also humored my deep emotional need to use words like “Sparklepuff”. Do you like information theory? Do you like molecular biology? Do you like the idea of smashing them together and seeing what happens? If so, then here’s a question: How much information is in your DNA? When I first looked into this question, I thought it was simple: Human DNA has about 3.1 billion base pairs. Each base pair can take one of four values (A, T, C, or G) It takes 2 bits to encode one of four possible values (00, 01, 10, or 11) Thus, human DNA contains 6.2 billion bits. Easy, right? Sure, except: You have two versions of each base pair, one from each of your parents. Should you count both? All humans have almost identical DNA. Does that matter? DNA can be compressed. Should you look at the compressed representation? It’s not clear how much of our ... Read full article.