A new study identified the largest known genome of any organism in a fern found in Pacific islands. Its cells have more than 50 times the DNA as human cells have.
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 amount of DNA in the fork fern’s gigantic genome may be more than 50 times greater than that of a human’s, but that doesn’t make the fern more complex or mean that it has more genes. Only about 1% of its genome are genes that encode for proteins, Pellicer estimated. The rest are nonfunctional repetitive sequences long deemed “junk DNA,” though scientists now know that it’s not actually junk. A lot of that genetic gibberish can affect how genes function.
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