DNA in Every Cell of Your Body Contains About 6 Feet of Genetic Code

Inside the nucleus of virtually every cell in your body, DNA is coiled, supercoiled, and packed incredibly tightly. If you could fully unravel and stretch out all the DNA in a single human cell, it would measure approximately 6 feet (1.8 meters) in length — packed into a nucleus only about 0.006 mm wide.

This is like fitting a thread 20 miles long into a tennis ball. The human body has approximately 37 trillion cells, and if you stretched all the DNA end to end, it would reach from Earth to the Sun and back about 600 times. The human genome contains about 3 billion base pairs encoding approximately 20,000–25,000 genes — though only about 2% of DNA codes for proteins.