Thermodynamic Rule Determining the Biological DNA Information Capacity

TL;DR

This paper derives a thermodynamic expression for the total biological information capacity of DNA, including coding and non-coding regions, suggesting human DNA contains a vast, largely unexplored informational 'program'.

Contribution

It introduces a rigorous thermodynamic framework to quantify the total information capacity of DNA, encompassing both coding and non-coding sequences.

Findings

Human DNA's information capacity is about a hundred megabytes.

Most of the DNA's informational content remains unexplored.

DNA functions as a complex, large-scale informational program.

Abstract

A rigorous thermodynamic expression is derived for the total biological information capacity per unit length of a DNA molecule. The total information includes the usual four letter coding sequence information plus that excess information coding often erroneously referred to as "junk". We conclude that the currently understood human DNA code is about a hundred megabyte program written on a molecule with about a ten gigabyte memory. By far, most of the programing code is not presently understood.