A recent study aimed to sequence and store the complete genomes of 10,000 humans from all across the world. Because there can be experimental errors in determining the complete genome sequence, scientists routinely repeat the sequencing experiment at least 30 times in order to be fully accurate about each nucleotide in every position. Therefore each human will have genomic data that is 30 times the size of a typical human genome.
1. How many letters (in terabytes) will the whole genome project generate? Please include all the data generated, including the repeated sequencing efforts
2. If a typical external hard drive can contain 1 terabyte of information (i.e., 1 terabyte of letters), how many hard drives will it take to store all the data described above?
3. Imagine that you have access to all the data from the project described above. Can you come up with two possible uses for this kind of data? What kinds of information or knowledge can this massive data set reveal?
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