Bioinformatics with Python Cookbook - Second Edition

Getting ready

Organism genomes come in widely different sizes, ranging from viruses such as HIV, which is 9.7 kbp, to bacteria such as E. coli, to protozoans like Plasmodium falciparum, with a 22 Mbp spread across 14 chromosomes, mitochondrion, and apicoplast, to the fruit fly with three autosomes, a mitochondrion, and X/Y sex chromosomes, to humans with their three Gbp pairs spread across 22 autosomes, X/Y chromosomes, and mitochondria, all the way up to Paris japonica, a plant with 150 Gbp of genome. Along the way, you have different ploidy and different sex chromosome organizations.

As you can see, different organisms have very different genome sizes. This difference can be of several orders of magnitude. This can have significant implications ...