The largest genome is once again surpassed. This time, a plant from the South Pacific is the one that breaks the record.
Since 2010 the record of largest genome I was in Paris japonica, a plant endemic to Japan. This organization held for more than 10 years the position that now a rare species of fernidentified as Tmesipteris oblancolata, take. And it is so thanks to those 160.45 gigabases that complete the extraordinary genome of the new number one.
What is your function? That’s the mystery
The path that led to this discovery began last year, when a group of researchers from the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), dependent on the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, in the Botanical Institute of BarcelonaI travel to New CaledoniaFrench overseas territory located in the southwest pacific. There, scientists collected samples of Tmesipteriswhich were subsequently analyzed to estimate the size of their genomes using the technique of flow cytometry.
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The article corresponding to this research was published in the journal iScience. According to the authors of the work, Finding this is not the result of chance.since there is more than a decade of research, in diversity of genomic sizes among plants, that supports the direction that scientists took to get here.
Therefore, it has been known for a long time that many plants have very large genomes. What is still not clear is why this particularity accompanies such organisms. That is to say: what function does it have?
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either way this plant belonging to a group that evolved long before the kingdom of dinosaurs It’s all a scientific milestone that excites, but that also makes old questions more alive than ever.
“Is the largest genome ever discovered in any living organism on the planet“, he told the BBC Ilia Leitch of London Botanic Gardens Kew Gardens.
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