Big things can sometimes come in small packages.
A small fern has broken the record for the largest genome yet known, researchers report May 31 in iScience. The plant’s full set of genetic instructions is over 50 times the size of the human genome. And it’s about 7 percent larger than the genome of the previous record holder, a Japanese flower dubbed Paris japonica.
Most plants have relatively small genomes, says Jaume Pellicer, an evolutionary biologist at the Botanical Institute of Barcelona. But some groups of plants are exceptions, possessing immense genomes that are some of the largest yet discovered across the tree of life. Pellicer and his colleagues were
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