This tiny fern has the largest genome of any organism on Earth
This tiny fern has the largest genome of any organism on Earth
In a new study published in the journal iScience, researchers from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the Institut Botànic de Barcelona (IBB-CSIC) in Spain present a new record-holder for the largest amount of DNA stored in the nucleus of any living organism on the planet.
Coming in at more than 100 meters of unraveled DNA, the New Caledonian fork fern species Tmesipteris oblanceolata was found to contain more than 50 times more DNA than humans and has dethroned the Japanese flowering plant species Paris japonica, which has held this record since 2010.
T. oblanceolata is a rare species of fern found on the island nation of New Caledonia, an overseas French territory situated in the Southwest Pacific, about 750 miles east of Australia, and some of the neighboring islands such as Vanuatu. The genus Tmesipteris is an understudied group of plants consisting of about 15 species, most of which occur across a range of Pacific Islands and Oceania.
