Answer 1:
My brief internet search comes up with a number of
three billion (six billion if counting both
maternal and paternal base pairs).
A warning: Because of the way you asked,
I get the impression that you may not understand
the meaning of base pair versus nucleotide. DNA is
a complimentary molecule where each nucleotide on
one strand is complimented by a corresponding
nucleotide on the other strand. This means that if
you know the sequence of nucleotides on one
strand, you automatically know the sequence of the
other strand as well. A base pair is a pair of
complimentary nucleotides - i.e. a pair where if
you know one, you know the other. Because of this,
the actual information in a DNA sequence depends
on the number of base pairs, NOT the number of
individual nucleotides, because half of the
nucleotides carry no additional information.
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