Guessing genome sizes at the Cambridge Science Festival

More than 100 people entered the Guessing genome sizes draw at the Cambridge Science Festival on Saturday 17th March.

The organism represented by the four jars of sugar strands was Campylobacter jejuni, with a genome of approximately 1.64 million bases (genetic letters). C. jejuni is the leading cause of food poisoning throughout the world. The Sanger Institute and collaborators published the genome sequence of C. jejuni in the year 2000.

The other two organisms Staphylococcus aureus and Escherichia coli would have required double or triple the number of sugar strands respectively to represent. We would have needed around 7000 jars to represent the human genome!

Winners of the commemorative coins and visits to the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus will be notified by email or phone.

Thanks for participating!