To be or not to be … in blast
Back to Bess — who still believes that all the possible 165-nucleotide sequences have already been discovered and catalogued in BLAST. After all, she reasons, the BLAST human genome contains about 5 trillion sequences, which does seem like an awful lot.
Recall, however, that we found that 2.19 × 1099 165-nucleotide sequences are theoretically possible. What percentage of the theoretically possible sequences are actually contained in BLAST?
Assume there are 5 trillion 165-AA sequences in BLAST. What percentage of 165-nucleotide sequences is this?
In other words, if you wanted to write this as a percentage, you would need more than 80 zeros after the decimal
point, like this:
0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000023%