distinguish between gigabases and gigabytes: GB?

[mattarno]

this is potentially a very dumb question: does everyone refer to gigabytes (of memory) and gigabases (of nucleotide sequence data) both as Gb in text? Or are there differences (GB and Gb)? Either way it's a wee bit confusing: especially for a beginner. Would it not be better to refer to gigabases as 'giganucleotides' (GN) when writing? Does that make sense to anyone else? Or am I the only confused beginner?

Cheers,
matt

[JackieBadger]

you should be able to deceiver the context. If it just says for eg 20GB of data, then that is talking about memory/file size.

[mattarno]

fair enough: but it's not always clear and obvious. anyway, just a minor whinge, I suppose

[swbarnes2]

I think you are right. B means bytes, b means bases.

Here's a quote from wikipedia:

The prefix giga means 109 in the International System of Units (SI), therefore 1 gigabyte is 1000000000bytes. The unit symbol for the gigabyte is GB or Gbyte, but not Gb (lower case b) which is typically used for the gigabit.

But in the context of sequencing, Gb is acceptable for gigabase, I think people pretty consistently use lowercase b for bases.

[maubp]

Sadly people don't consistently used B for bytes, and also b can mean bits.

I would try and use Gbases rather Gb to avoid the potential ambiguity.

[westerman]

I'm with Peter. Since GB (bytes) and Gb (bits) are already taken by computer science then GBases would be the preferred nomenclature if there is any chance of confusion.