Practical electronics strongly favors binary representations for encoding information (two-state; 0 or 1). In DNA, biology uses a quaternary representation of four different nucleobases (four-state; cytosine [C], guanine [G], adenine [A] or thymine [T]) to code for the amino acids with which all the proteins in our bodies are constructed. All proteins are long chemical chains assembled from 20 different types of amino acids.

a) What is the minimum number of nucleobase digits required to code for the 20 different amino acids? (Groups of nucleotides, each coding for a single amino acid in a protein chain, are called codons by biologists.) (Hint: How many four-state "digits" are needed to represent 20 unique things?)

b) A binary representation is used to store the human genome on a digital computer. How many bits are required to represent each nucleotide in the genetic code? (Note: There is one nucleobase in a nucleotide)

c) The DNA in a human genome consists of about 3 billion (3,000,000,000) nucleotides (base pairs). How many bits are required to store this information in a binary format?

d) The memory in a computer is usually organized in groups of 8 bits, called Bytes. How many bytes of memory are required to store your genome in a digital computer?