Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-short-options-paper-shared-by-prelims-and-parts-a-and-b-of-the-physics-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2016/s12/2/3/solution

A base pair has four possible sequence identities, hence two bits, not four bits from treating complementary strands as independent. B-DNA has diameter approximately 2 nm, axial rise 0.34 nm per base pair and about ten base pairs per helical turn. The tightly packed-cylinder upper density is therefore
A haploid human genome has about raw bits; in a nucleus of several hundred cubic micrometres its bulk density is order bits m, far lower. Cellular DNA must allow hydration, packaging, regulatory access and copying/repair machinery, and cannot fill a cell as parallel bare cylinders. Diploidy and repeated or constrained sequence also reduce independent functional information compared with the raw four-letter capacity; those concepts should not be confused with geometric storage density.
The original molecular figure in question 3 shows the approximate helical dimensions.

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