• Question: If you were to untangle all of your DNA in your body, how far would it reach?

    Asked by anon-292579 on 4 May 2021.
    • Photo: Kip Heath

      Kip Heath answered on 20 Apr 2021:

      So your genome (which is made up of your DNA) is made up of base pairs and it is 3 billion base pairs in length! If you unwound it – each genome would be about 2 metres long. (This is 6ft 6inches, so taller than most adults).

      And that is just one cell. You have an almost uncountable number of cells.

    • Photo: Quentin Leclerc

      Quentin Leclerc answered on 20 Apr 2021:

      That’s a great question!
      Let’s look at just one of our cells first. In that cell, DNA is super tightly packed, but if we unfolded it it would form a very very thin string (still invisible to the naked eye, as the width of the string would be tiny). However, the length of the string would be about 2 meters.
      Now, let’s multiply this by the number of cells in our body. A human body is approximately 1 trillion cells (1,000,000,000,000), so if we took all the DNA from all cells, this would be around 2 trillion meters long!
      That’s a massive number! For comparison, the diameter of the Earth is approximately 13 million meters, so we could wrap the DNA 150,000 times around the Earth.

    • Photo: Ed Peake

      Ed Peake answered on 21 Apr 2021:

      Quintin gave a great answer, for those interested in astrophysics that nearly 2 light hours, or the distance to the sun and back nearly 7000 times.

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