how much info can a human cell hold?

Question

how much in terms of pages of a book equivalents?

I found the quote I was looking for: Fact: A single human cell measuring 1/1,000 of an inch across contains instructions within its DNA that would fill 1,000 books of 600 pages each (Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now)

Answer 1

Each chromosome approximately contains 500 million genetic code words. Imagine about the information in total 46 chromosomes and you can calculate the no. of pages if a page can approximately contain 500-600 words.

Answer 2

I don't how much information an entire human cell can hold, but I can tell you how much information a strand of human DNA can hold. It is hard to fathom, but the amount of information in human DNA is roughly equivalent to 12 sets of The Encyclopaedia Britannica -- an incredible 384 volumes worth of detailed information that would fill 48 feet of library shelves. Yet in their actual size -- which is only 2 millionths of a millimeter thick, if you run your fingers through your hair now and look at a single strand. It is not very thick -- maybe 100 microns in diameter (a micron is a millionth of a meter, so 100 microns is a tenth of a millimeter -- 1000 microns is 1 millimeter). A typical human cell might be one-tenth of the diameter of your hair (10 microns) and a strand of human DNA might be 2 microns which is 50 times smaller than a human hair and 5 times smaller than a typical human cell -- a teaspoon of DNA, according to molecular biologist Michael Denton, could contain all the information needed to build all the proteins for all the species of organisms that have ever lived on earth, and "there would still be enough room left for all the information in every book ever written". A strand of human DNA is, when uncoiled, approximately 6 feet long. This is coiled up in everyone of our approximately 10 trillion cells. According to another scientist, "A surprising statistic about the human genome," he said, "is the length of a unique sequence. It turns out to be about 16 to 20 base pairs, or about half an inch of a string stretched from New York to the West Coast." A zipper the size of the human genome would need some 3 billion teeth. Coil it into a ball 50 feet in diameter and you'll have an idea of how your genes -- all 100,000 of them -- are crammed into the 23 pairs of chromosomes in the nucleus of each of your cells. These analogies, the long string and the coiled zipper, give an idea of how huge and delicate and difficult to get at the human genome is. But to understand how to decipher the information it contains, you need to think of it as a book. "Measured as Manhattan telephone books, each containing about 1,000 pages of 10-point type," he said, "the genome of the bacterium E. coli is about a third of a book -- about 333 1/3 pages. Baker's yeast, which is my specialty, is a full book. The human genome will occupy 200 books." These 200,000 pages of genetic information, encoding everything from the color of your eyes to your likelihood of colon cancer, are written in the language of DNA. In structure it's a double helix: two strands of sugars and phosphates linked by pairs of the four bases, A, T, C, or G. The four bases create the alphabet. Every word in this language is three letters long, and stands for one amino acid. Each sentence, which can be many hundreds of words long, is a gene.

Answer 3

DNA is present in the nucleus of every cell in your body. That DNA holds the code for your entire cellular makeup. Since people dont come with schematic diagrams, I don't think you could get an accurate conversion.

Answer 4

depends on the books, the size of the print etc. But each cell holds the entire recipe for making that critter all over again...

Answer 5

that is indeterminable since the genes in the nucleus hold so much information that "writing it down" would be impossible. I doubt your feeble thought process could comprehend such a large amount of information, you douche.

Answer 6

there is NO LIMIT for studies on cell... esp DNA