Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/06/01/unassuming-fern-has-largest-genome-yet-found-its-just-ridiculous.html
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No such thing as an unassuming fern, and now it turns out they’re even more wonderful than I realized!
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“You are not a fern. How do you know how unassuming it is?”
“You are not me. How do you know that I don’t know how unassuming the fern is?”
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Hoarding is a tough habit to break.
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It just looks like a fern. It’s really something complicated and deadly, hiding.
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The most interesting part is that the supposedly non-coding DNA has to be serving some purpose, or it’d have been lost. It’s energetically expensive for a cell to replicate DNA, and so you’d expect selective pressure towards kicking out nonfunctional bits.
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Triffid.
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It’s got sequences ready for any eventuality! plus backups (“Why this one here between intron #5763 and #5764 only upsets an Ankylosaurus’ tummy”)
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Cool.
It’s 50 times bigger than the human genome, not five.
They haven’t assembled the genome yet, so they don’t know how many chromosomes it has or how big individual chromosomes are. Another fern in the genus was shown to be octoploid though (8 copies of each chromosome). So this fern’s giant genome is likely made of lots of chromosome rather than giant chromosomes
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Hit it with the right environmental triggers to active normally dormant gene sequences, and Bjorn Stronginthearm’s your uncle.
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They start decoding it and find gactacgtacgacttcggHELPIMTRAPPEDINAGENOMEFACTORYactgtgccaaag… . (cf.)
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Possibly, though the article speculates that the fern has not lived in a stressed environment and so it just accumulated base pairs that serve no biological function. Not a biologis, so I don’t know how plausible this really is.
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Right. It would be lost if there was some selection pressure to lose it. If there isn’t that pressure, if individuals that lose those parts aren’t more likely to survive and produce offspring, it just hangs on.
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Look, it could be something cute like spontaneously generating fairies when the conditions are right.
(For varying amounts of cute.)
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