STORY: Here in the wilderness of New Caledonia –
scientists have discovered a living organism with the largest genome in the world.
:: RGB KEW
“And particularly it’s exciting because it’s a plant.”
New research shows that the genome size of this fork fern species…
is estimated to be more than 50 times the size of a human genome.
:: Ilia Leitch, Plant geneticist, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew
“And it breaks all previous records. So, it’s a really exciting study for understanding really biology at its limits.”
Scientists have long wondered why some organisms have large genomes and others do not.
Plant geneticist Ilia Leitch, at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in the U.K., co-authored the study published in the journal iScience.
“We’ve been able to show that genome size can have an impact, influencing how and where and when a plant is able to grow. How successful it is at competing with other plants in the plant community, and indeed the likelihood of its ability to be resilient to climate change or its ability to not be threatened with extinction.”
The specimens used in the study were collected last year on New Caledonia’s Grande Terre Island.
The fern grows primarily on the ground or atop fallen tree trunks.
It belongs to a fern family whose evolutionary lineage split from other ferns around 350 million years ago, approximately 120 million years before dinosaurs appeared.
“This fern has in fact 416 chromosomes in every cell. Whereas the sequencing of the human genome has involved assembling the DNA into 23 chromosomes.”
But a large genome is not necessarily considered beneficial.
For instance, larger genomes require more resources for DNA replication, repair and transcription – a process a cell uses to make the proteins an organism needs to function.
“Well our most recent research is actually showing that perhaps not surprisingly, species with bigger genomes are at greater risk of extinction. And so understanding genome size, knowing the genome size of plants means that we can perhaps contribute to identifying species which are at greater risk than others.”
Africa’s marbled lung fish has the biggest-known animal genome. The fern’s is nearly 25% larger.
“It just highlights the fact that plants are really important to all of us, because they provide us with food and the oxygen that we breathe and the clothes that we wear. And so raising the profile of plants just to perhaps in this small way, is just contributing to helping people really appreciate the importance and value of plants and why we need to conserve them.”
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