This number (37.5 Mb) gets reported all of the time and it's very wrong. A single sperm has 3.5 billion base pairs of DNA in it. Since there are 4 possible bases, that means each position in DNA could store four bits of information. That gives 14 billion bits of information. Assuming 8 bits per byte, that 1.75 billion bytes of information or 1.63 Gb (at 1,073,741,824 bytes per gigabyte). That corresponds to roughly 43 times as much information as 37.5 Mb.
tetchilyEngage t1_jczw7xj wrote
Reply to A single sperm contains 37.5MB of DNA by mutilatedxlips
This number (37.5 Mb) gets reported all of the time and it's very wrong. A single sperm has 3.5 billion base pairs of DNA in it. Since there are 4 possible bases, that means each position in DNA could store four bits of information. That gives 14 billion bits of information. Assuming 8 bits per byte, that 1.75 billion bytes of information or 1.63 Gb (at 1,073,741,824 bytes per gigabyte). That corresponds to roughly 43 times as much information as 37.5 Mb.