It would take about 50 cds to store all my raw genome data. Yet, if filtered and trimed down to the true final data, it would comprise a file taking only 1/30th of a cd. That's a 1500 fold reduction.

There's something about this that just seems a bit wrong. I would have expected no more than about 1200 fold noise reduction to get to the useful stuff.

Here's the blog.

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Lighten up! This is a stellar board! Author: duh.

"The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the universe to do..." Author: Galileo supposedly.

Back in the days when UseNet was not completely insane, the Chowder Society used to debate the possible biological significance of redudancy (and other notions from Shannon's information theory) in the newsgroup bionet.info-theory

Try this search

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Chris Hillman

Read these PF posts. Avoid Wikipedia--- except for these versions. Read this and this suggested sticky. When asked for advice, I always say: never take advice!

My personal opinion is that not all "junk DNA" is as junkie as the experts believe.

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

No doubt you're right. But, the stuff they reduce to get down to 1/30th of a cd is not the junk DNA.

The link explains how color dot images are taken for small sections of DNA. This is not all that accurate so they take about 30 images, I think, to obtain the desired level of accuracy. It seems to be these many thousands of raw images that would comprise the 50 cds. Once it all gets sorted-out, the result is much smaller.

I'm not up on this field of science, but [ I ] couldn't shake the humorous analogy that might well apply to all most posts around here.

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Lighten up! This is a stellar board! Author: duh.

"The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the universe to do..." Author: Galileo supposedly.

A decade ago, one idea in the air concerning possible adaptive value of "junk DNA" recognized the fact that in the living cell, DNA is coiled around histones sort of like many tightly coiled telephone handset cords, "spliced" with short and much more loosely coiled cords. Another idea was that junk DNA has adaptive value, not to the host, but to transposons, which you can think of as a bit like badly written malware getting into your OS (and probably not doing anything for or agin' you other than wasting disk space). That idea held that junk DNA is good for malware because it can hide more easily in a jungle of apparently inert lengths of DNA.

More recently it has been widely recognized that in order to define an organism, one must specify not only the genome but which genes are expressed (roughly, by being loosely coiled around histones and thus available for transcription). Thus, some genes might not have been recognized as such because they happen to typically be "turned off" in study organisms.

This should all be taken loosely since these ideas are actually quite complex and would take a long time to explain all the subtleties.

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Chris Hillman

Read these PF posts. Avoid Wikipedia--- except for these versions. Read this and this suggested sticky. When asked for advice, I always say: never take advice!