What is 600 billion base pairs?

600 billion base pairs is like having 600 billion tiny building blocks inside your body that help make you who you are.

Imagine you have a super long string made up of little colored beads. Each bead has a color, and the colors follow certain patterns. In your body, there’s something called DNA, which is like one of those strings, but way longer and way more complicated! These tiny colored beads are called base pairs.

Think of DNA as a recipe that tells your body how to grow and work. Each base pair is like a single letter in the recipe. If you had 600 billion letters, that’s like having enough letters to write a really long story, so long, it would take you many years to read it all!

And there are two of these strings inside each of your body's cells. That means every single one of your cells has this super-long recipe inside it, working hard to keep you going!