"dsimcha" <dsim...@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:ijq2bl$2opj$1...@digitalmars.com... > On 2/19/2011 10:21 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote: >> Out of curiosity, roughly how many, umm "characters" (I forget the >> technical >> term for each T, G, etc), are in each yeast gene, and how many genes do >> they >> have? (Humans have, umm, was it 26? My last biology class was ages ago.) >> > > It varies massively, but you can compute the averages yourself. There are > about 6,000 yeast genes and about 12 million nucleotides (the technical > term for "characters"). Humans have about 20k to 25k genes, and a total > of about 3 billion nucleotides, though a lot of this is intergenic regions > (stuff that isn't genes).
Ahh, I was confusing "gene" with "chromosome" (and probably still got the exact number wrong ;) ). Interesting stuff. And that certianly explains the computation-practicality difference of yeast vs human: approx 12MB vs 3GB, assuming ASCII/UTF-8.