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World record broken for living thing with most DNA

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49 minutes ago

Helen Briggs, Environment Correspondent, BBC News, @hbriggs

Pol Fernandez

A fern has entered the record books for having more DNA than any other living thing.

The plant’s genetic material, or genome, would reach about 100 metres when unravelled, outstripping Big Ben.

Scientists say it’s a “crazy” amount of DNA for a tiny plant that most people would walk by without noticing.

“It’s the biggest genome that has ever been discovered out of all organisms that live on this planet,” Dr Ilia Leitch of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, told BBC News.

“How does it function? How does it survive with that much DNA in it?”

Pol Fernandez

The genome is the complete set of DNA instructions within a cell containing all the information needed for a living thing to develop and grow.

Many plants have big genomes and scientists want to find out why.

They hope to understand how this affects function – and might influence extinction risk.

The fern, known as Tmesipteris oblanceolate, belongs to a primordial group of plants that evolved long before the dinosaurs set foot on the earth.

It’s found only on New Caledonia in the Pacific Ocean and a few neighbouring islands, where it grows on the trunks and branches of rainforest trees.

Pol Fernandez

In the study, published in the journal iScience, international researchers extracted genetic material from specimens collected in New Caledonia.

They measured how much dye bound to the DNA – the more dye, the bigger the genome.

The fern was found to

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