Picture
This shows the total number of nucleotides (letters of DNA) that have been registered in GenBank, a national repository. The data is from GenBank (visualized by some Wikipedians). Then number of nucleotides is graphed on a logarithmic scale, where a straight line means that the number of nucleotides that have been registered is increasing exponentially.
 


Comments

Dennis
03/19/2010 08:27

That is not correct. That is the number of basepairs/nucleotides in Genbank, not genes.

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Samuel Arbesman link
03/19/2010 08:32

Great catch! I fixed it. Thanks.

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Nessie link
03/22/2010 11:46

It's actually the number of base pairs in the sequences in GenBank. While there are more than the 5 basic nucleotides, there aren't billions.

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Samuel Arbesman link
03/22/2010 11:50

The number of nucleotides in a genome, if haploid, is equal to the number of base pairs. What you are writing about is the number of distinct nucleotides, which, while interesting, is not what GenBank tracks.

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