length of a dna strand?

Answer 1

DNA found in many cells can be macroscopic in length -- approximately 2 meters long for strands in a human chromosome

Answer 2

I gave this as answer to another question, hope it's enough information.

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

the length of a DNA strand is 86 feet divided by 96, multiply by 47 subract that first 86 add 12

Answer 4

The human genome is 3 billion nucleotides (letters) long. You have two copies, one from each parent, so you have 6 billion letters in your genetic code per cell (roughly). Incidentally, the accuracy of your DNA polymerase is only about 1 in 1 billion, so your cells make an average of 6 mistakes (mutations) every single time they divide.

There is a lot of non-coding DNA, transcription regulatory sequences, sequences that mean things to cell machines (boundaries of genes etc), sequences that cap your DNA (telomeres), and genes that serve mechanical functions (ie centromeres).

Interestingly, only about 4% of your DNA actually codes for genes. There are an estimated 30,000 genes in the human genome that probably give rise to million upon millions of proteins. This is kind of strange when you realize that about 8% of your genome is from ancient viral DNA sequences that infected your ancestors untold ages ago and some of which do things. The promoter that drives amylase (the enzyme that breaks down starch in your saliva) is viral in origin. Also, the proteins that cause placental cells to adhere to one another is an old viral capsid gene that bound the virus to its target cell. Nature is amazing, isn't it.....you virus.

Answer 5

fully extended, they are actually aronud 7 feet long, no joke

Answer 6

all geniuses