The fern, known as Tmesipteris oblanceolata, has spore-producing spherical buildings
Oriane Hidalgo
A printed model of your entire human genome would fill 220 massive books. To do the identical for a small, seemingly unremarkable fern discovered on a number of Pacific islands would require practically 11,000 books.
The plant, known as Tmesipteris oblanceolata, has the biggest identified genome of any organism, Jaume Pellicer on the Botanical Institute of Barcelona in Spain and his colleagues have found.
Every cell within the fern has 321 billion letters – or base pairs – of DNA in its nucleus. If organized in a line, this may stretch for round 105 metres. “From what we know, that’s the largest,” says Pellicer.
By comparability, the nucleus of a human cell accommodates simply over 6 billion base pairs, or round 2 metres, of DNA – round 50 occasions lower than the fern.
Earlier than this discovery, the biggest identified genome was that of a Japanese flowering plant known as Paris japonica, which has 298 billion base pairs in every nucleus, Pellicer reported in 2010. The most important identified animal genome is that of the marbled lungfish, Protopterus aethiopicus, with 260 billion base pairs per nucleus.
T. oblanceolata is a uncommon plant that grows solely on some islands of New Caledonia and Vanuatu within the south- west Pacific. In 2023, Pellicer and his colleagues collected samples from New Caledonia.
To work out the scale of the fern’s genome, they extracted the nuclei of cells from its stems, stained the DNA contained in the nuclei with a fluorescent dye after which measured the sunshine depth because the nuclei handed beneath a lightweight detector.
Pellicer says there are two the explanation why some vegetation have huge genomes. Firstly, many vegetation have a number of units of chromosomes, fairly than the 2 units which can be ordinary in animals. T. oblanceolata has eight units of chromosomes.
However most vegetation with a number of units of chromosomes nonetheless have small genomes total, says Pellicer. Somewhat, the important thing issue is a failure to manage the expansion of genetic parasites known as transposons.
Transposons are bits of DNA that may copy and paste themselves, inflicting genomes to increase quickly until organisms evolve methods to suppress them or handle to do away with the surplus DNA. Many genomes, together with that of people, consist largely of repetitive sequences generated by transposons.
Having an enormous genome is a drawback, says Pellicer. “Everything takes longer,” he says. “Every time a cell has to divide, it has to replicate all the DNA. So the more DNA there is, the longer it takes to be replicated.”
It additionally means cells should be bigger to accommodate all of the DNA, and the pores in leaves and stems, known as stomata, can not reply as rapidly to adjustments within the surroundings when they’re made from bigger cells, says Pellicer.
He thinks vegetation that fail to manage transposons and restrict the scale of their genomes are likely to go extinct. “That’s why we only see them in a very few lineages,” says Pellicer. T. oblanceolata might survive solely as a result of competitors is much less intense on the small islands the place it grows, he says.
The researchers plan to sequence a small a part of the fern’s genome fairly than trying to take action for your entire sequence. It is because they lack the computational energy wanted to assemble and analyse such a big and repetitive genome, says Pellicer.
“It is exciting to see that we are still finding new boundaries on how large nuclear DNA contents can get,” says Ryan Gregory on the College of Guelph in Canada. Nonetheless, there’s some debate about the best way to outline genome dimension, he says. Some suppose it ought to be outlined as the scale of 1 set of chromosomes, fairly than the overall quantity of DNA in a cell, which suggests the document for the biggest genome would go to the marbled lungfish.
Many biologists outline genome dimension as the quantity of DNA in egg, pollen or sperm cells, which is half the quantity in regular cells. Based on this definition, the genome dimension of T. oblanceolata is simply 160.45 billion base pairs.
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