Year: 2022

PLANETARY LIFE INVENTORY. "Ms. Landenmark and her colleagues performed an exhaustive review of the number of microbes, plants, animals and fungi found on Earth. They also included viruses, because those agents play an important role in processing DNA and genes." https://lnkd.in/eUq6xFH View in LinkedIn

HUMAN DNA STRING. "You have about 10 trillion cells in your body, so if you stretched the DNA in all the cells out, end to end, they'd stretch over 744 million miles. The moon is only about 250,000 miles away, so all your DNA would stretch to the moon and back almost 1500 times. The sun is 93,000,000 miles away, so your DNA would reach there and back about 4 times!" https://lnkd.in/efn84gu View in LinkedIn

BIODIVERSITY AS GENETIC INFORMATION. "Using available DNA sequencing and genome data, combined with large-scale surveys of biomass, we present an alternative way of quantifying and understanding biodiversity. This is accomplished by adopting an information view of biodiversity, in which the total amount of information in the biosphere is represented by the available amount of DNA." https://lnkd.in/ewABXeK View in LinkedIn

PLANET AS SUPERCOMPUTER. "The biosphere can be visualised as a large, parallel supercomputer, with the information storage represented by the total amount of DNA and the processing power symbolised by transcription rates. In analogy with the Internet, all organisms on Earth are individual containers of information connected through interactions and biogeochemical cycles in a large, global, bottom-up network." https://lnkd.in/ewABXeK View in LinkedIn

TOTAL DNA ON PLANET. "We estimate the total amount of DNA in the biosphere to be 5.3 × 10(31) (±3.6 × 10(31)) megabase pairs (Mb). This quantity corresponds to approximately 5 × 10(10) tonnes of DNA. This DNA is equivalent to the volume of approximately 1 billion standard (6.1 × 2.44 × 2.44 m) shipping containers." 50 billion tons of DNA! https://lnkd.in/ewABXeK View in LinkedIn

PLANETARY DNA INFORMATION. "The Computational Power of the Biosphere...allows us to estimate a lower bound on the total information content in the biosphere: 5.3 × 10(31) (±3.6 × 10(31)) megabases (Mb) of DNA." (53 nonillion: a cardinal number represented in the U.S. by 1 followed by 30 zeros, and in Great Britain by 1 followed by 54 zeros). https://lnkd.in/ewABXeK View in LinkedIn

TOTAL PLANETARY DNA TRANSCRIPTION. "A typical speed of DNA transcription is 18–42 bases per second for RNA polymerase II to travel along chromatin templates and elsewhere suggested as 100 bases per second. Precisely how much of the DNA on Earth is being transcribed at any one time is unknown." https://lnkd.in/ewABXeK View in LinkedIn

TIME FROM DNA TO PROTEIN. "The average human gene is about 28,000 bases long, with only about 5% of it encoding for protein, which on an average is about 450 amino acids long. The major steps that take some time are: Transcription [DNA → pre-mRNA]: ~20min; Splicing [pre-mRNA → mature mRNA]: 5-10min; Transport [mRNA from nucleus to cytoplasm]: 10-30min; Translation [mRNA → Protein]: 90sec." https://lnkd.in/e2Z6svw View in LinkedIn

BIOSPHERE PROCESSING SPEEDS. "Given conservative estimates regarding DNA transcription rates, this information content suggests biosphere processing speeds exceeding yottaNOPS values 10(24)." (NOPS: Nucleotide Operations Per Second). https://lnkd.in/ewABXeK View in LinkedIn

PLANETARY COMPUTING POWER. "If all the DNA in the biosphere was being transcribed at these reported rates, taking an estimated transcription rate of 30 bases per second, then the potential computational power of the biosphere would be approximately 10(15) yottaNOPS (yotta = 10(24)), about 10(22) times more processing power than the Tianhe-2 supercomputer, which has a processing power on the order of 10(5) teraFLOPS (tera = 10(12))." https://lnkd.in/ewABXeK View in LinkedIn