alt Hacker NewsThat's not strictly true - DNA doesnt replicate itself, a cell with DNA replicates itself.
You need to count the information contained in the non-DNA part of the cell too.
Just in case it's not obvious, you can't take human DNA and put it in a cat cell, it won't work, that cell won't replicate.
True.
For now, the DNA replication and the synthesis of RNA and proteins using the information stored in DNA are the best understood parts about how a cell grows and divides, but how other complex cellular structures, e.g. membranes or non-ribosomal peptides, are assembled and replicated is much less understood.
We need more years of research, perhaps up to a decade or two, until we will be able to know the entire amount of information describing a simple bacterial cell, and perhaps more than that for a much more complex eukaryotic cell.