Genetic information in Oocyte RNA

RNA of the mature Xenopus oocyte was hybridized with the isolated non-repetitive DNA fraction of the Xenopus genome. The hybrids had the thermal stability and other characteristics expected of non-repetitive DNA-RNA hybrids, and DNA recovered from them reassociated at the rate of non-repetitive DNA. By saturating the non-repetitive DNA with Oocyte RNA a direct minimum estimate was obtained of the amount of non-repetitive sequence in the oocyte RNA, i.e. its genomic information content. The oocyte RNA contains about 20 × 10^6 nucleotide pairs of diverse sequence, which is 4.5 times the total genomic information present in the Escherichia coli chromosome