How to make a (real) butterfly out of paper

The instructions for making an origami butterfly could be sketched on the back of the page it was folded out of, but how long are the instructions for making a real butterfly?

The life recipe of a butterfly, the DNA sequence of its genome, is about 280 million "base pairs" long. The art of origami might offer a means to put this number into perspective. Cambridge scientist Alex Bateman has developed an origami model of the DNA "double-helix". So now, rather than making a paper butterfly, we can try to figure out how much paper we'd need to create the complete DNA sequence of a real one.

In a recent record-breaking feat, Dr Bateman lead the construction of a 247 metre long paper DNA strand. This model represented about 10,000 base pairs, only a tiny fraction of a genome. A complete butterfly genome made in this way would require 25 million sheets of paper and would easily stretch across the Atlantic. The human genome, which is more than ten times the size, would wrap around the world three times!

Of course this is a huge-scale model, and in reality the human genome, stretched out in one long line, would be a few metres in length. Also, the genome is not a single DNA strand - it is divided up into 23 chromosomes (21 in a butterfly). Still, it is remarkable that all of this DNA (in fact two copies of each chromosome - one from each of our parents) is crammed into every single living cell in our bodies.