An estimate of the total DNA in the biosphere

H.K. E. Landenmark; D.H. Forgan; C.S. Cockell

doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1002168

An estimate of the total DNA in the biosphere

H.K. E. Landenmark, D.H. Forgan, C.S. Cockell

School of Physics and Astronomy

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

Modern whole-organism genome analysis, in combination with biomass estimates, allows us to estimate a lower bound on the total information content in the biosphere: 5.3 × 10³¹ (±3.6 × 10³¹) megabases (Mb) of DNA. Given conservative estimates regarding DNA transcription rates, this information content suggests biosphere processing speeds exceeding yottaNOPS values (10²⁴ Nucleotide Operations Per Second). Although prokaryotes evolved at least 3 billion years before plants and animals, we find that the information content of prokaryotes is similar to plants and animals at the present day. This informationbased approach offers a new way to quantify anthropogenic and natural processes in the biosphere and its information diversity over time.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	1-10
Number of pages	10
Journal	PLoS Biology
Volume	13
Issue number	6
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002168
Publication status	Published - 11 Jun 2015

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© 2015 Landenmark et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited
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An estimate of the total DNA in the biosphere

Abstract

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