Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.You wouldn’t know it by looking at them, but some plants have a lot more DNA than others. And perhaps even more baffling, some have a lot more than most animals — including humans. Now, scientists are revealing ever more extreme examples of this giant-genome phenomenon even as their existence remains a mystery.New research has identified the largest known genome of any living organism in an unassuming fern found in New Caledonia, an island chain in the South Pacific Ocean. The rare plant contains 160 billion base pairs, the coupled units that make up strands of DNA, according to the study. By comparison, the human genome consists of a mere 3 billion.“Little humble things can hide one of the most amazing secrets inside,” said evolutionary biologist Jaume Pellicer, a researcher at Spain’s Botanical Institute of Barcelona and corresponding author of the study published May 31 in the journal Cell.Massive genomes are also rare. According to Pellicer, of 12,000 or so documented plant genomes, all but a half dozen are at least an order of magnitude smaller than that of the fork fern, named Tmesipteris oblanceolata, that’s described in the paper.“The limits of biology are out there to be uncovered,” Pellicer said. He should know — he keeps uncovering them.Before this study, the largest known genome of any fungus, plant or animal belonged to the Paris japonica flower, holder of 149 billion base pairs (gigabase pairs, or Gbp).Pellicer was part of the team that revealed the P. japoni …
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[mwai_chat context=”Let’s have a discussion about this article:nnSign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.You wouldn’t know it by looking at them, but some plants have a lot more DNA than others. And perhaps even more baffling, some have a lot more than most animals — including humans. Now, scientists are revealing ever more extreme examples of this giant-genome phenomenon even as their existence remains a mystery.New research has identified the largest known genome of any living organism in an unassuming fern found in New Caledonia, an island chain in the South Pacific Ocean. The rare plant contains 160 billion base pairs, the coupled units that make up strands of DNA, according to the study. By comparison, the human genome consists of a mere 3 billion.“Little humble things can hide one of the most amazing secrets inside,” said evolutionary biologist Jaume Pellicer, a researcher at Spain’s Botanical Institute of Barcelona and corresponding author of the study published May 31 in the journal Cell.Massive genomes are also rare. According to Pellicer, of 12,000 or so documented plant genomes, all but a half dozen are at least an order of magnitude smaller than that of the fork fern, named Tmesipteris oblanceolata, that’s described in the paper.“The limits of biology are out there to be uncovered,” Pellicer said. He should know — he keeps uncovering them.Before this study, the largest known genome of any fungus, plant or animal belonged to the Paris japonica flower, holder of 149 billion base pairs (gigabase pairs, or Gbp).Pellicer was part of the team that revealed the P. japoni …nnDiscussion:nn” ai_name=”RocketNews AI: ” start_sentence=”Can I tell you more about this article?” text_input_placeholder=”Type ‘Yes'”]
