Well, it depends a lot on many many things.
1) whole genome of what organism?
2) what sequence technology?
3) what coverage?
4) what file format is used to store the data?
5) what information is to be kept? (e.g. base calling qualities)
As it stands, it is impossible to answer this question accurately.
Well, it depends a lot on many many things.
1) whole genome of what organism?
2) what sequence technology?
3) what coverage?
4) what file format is used to store the data?
5) what information is to be kept? (e.g. base calling qualities)
As it stands, it is impossible to answer this question accurately.
sorry, I mean the human whole genome resulting from next generation sequencing.
As I understand it, an approximation for this size is that 1 base = 1 byte. Gigabases and gigabytes therefore have very similar magnitudes.
As José stated, the actual amount depends on what you want to do and whether or not you want to store the sequences with the quality values.
The usual encoding is in ASCII, so Kelly is correct that 1 base = 1 byte. In principle, you would need only 2 bits per pure base, so if you compress the data, you can shrink your storage needs quite a bit. But if you also want the quality, the compression factor goes down quite a bit. And most programs need uncompressed data anyway.
So if you want to have 20x coverage (the lowest I would use, I strongly recommend >50x) with quality values, you need 2 * 20 * ~3.5 GByte = 140 GByte. But I agree with Uma, you should think in TByte/Tbp
I found this paper very interesting. "An approximate conversion factor to use in interpreting these numbers is 4 bases = 1 byte". Best Regards,
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