Max Kozlov in Nature:
A small, unassuming fern-like plant has something massive lurking within: the largest genome ever discovered, outstripping the human genome by more than 50 times1.
The plant (Tmesipteris oblanceolata) contains a whopping 160 billion base pairs, the units that make up a strand of DNA. That’s 11 billion more than the previous record holder, the flowering plant Paris japonica, and 30 billion more than the marbled lungfish (Protopterus aethiopicus), which has the largest animal genome. The findings were published today in iScience.
Study co-author Jaume Pellicer, an evolutionary biologist at the Botanical Institute of Barcelona in Spain, who also co-discovered P. japonica’s gargantuan genome2, had thought that the earlier discovery was close to the genome size limit. “But the evidence has once again surpassed our expectations,” he says.
More here.