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Is There an Upper Limit to Genome Size?

Author information

Affiliations

  • 1. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Richmond TW9 3DS, UK.
      Authors
    • Hidalgo O 1
    • Pellicer J 1
    • Leitch IJ 1
    (3 authors)
  • 2. Plant Gateway, 5 Talbot Street, Hertford SG13 7BX, UK.
      Authors
    • Christenhusz M 2
    (1 author)
  • 3. Department of Life Sciences, Natural History Museum, London W7 5BD, UK; Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Centre for Integrative Conservation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Menglun, Mengla, Yunnan, PR China.
      Authors
    • Schneider H 3
    (1 author)
  • 4. School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, London E1 4NS, UK.
      Authors
    • Leitch AR 4
    (1 author)

ORCIDs linked to this article

Trends in Plant Science, 12 May 2017, 22(7):567-573
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tplants.2017.04.005 PMID: 28506667 

Review

Abstract 

At 50-fold the size of the human genome (3 Gb), the staggeringly huge genome of 147.3 Gb recently discovered in the fern Tmesipteris obliqua is comparable in size to those of the other plant and animal record-holders (i.e., Paris japonica, a flowering plant with a genome size of 148.8 Gb, and Protopterus aethiopicus, a lungfish with a genome of 130 Gb). The synthesis of available information on giant genomes suggests that the biological limit to genome size expansion in eukaryotes may have been reached. We propose several explanations for why the genomes of ferns, flowering plants, and lungfish, all of which have independently undergone dramatic increases in genome size through a variety of mechanisms, do not exceed 150 Gb.

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Read article at publisher's site: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tplants.2017.04.005

Read article for free, from open access legal sources, via Unpaywall: https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/bitstream/123456789/24818/1/Leitch%20Is%20There%20an%20Upper%202017%20Accepted.pdfUnpaywall

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