Largest Genome Ever 189
sciencehabit writes "A rare Japanese flower named Paris japonica sports an astonishing 149 billion base pairs, making it 50 times the size of a human genome — and the largest genome ever found. The genome would be taller than Big Ben if stretched out end to end. The researchers warn however that big genomes tend to be a liability: plants with lots of DNA have more trouble tolerating pollution and extreme climatic extinctions—and they grow more slowly than plants with less DNA, because it takes so long to replicate their genome."
So lots of things. (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, a large genome generally means lots of redundancy. Lots of redundancy is theorized to mean high resistance to radiation. This plant should, therefore, be highly resistant. That is potentially quite useful knowledge. Back in the days when people looked to hydroponics and Biosphere 2 as a way of getting oxygen into an artificial environment, they forgot to take into consideration that most plantlife won't cope with the radiation on, say, Mars. In order to be able to get a livable environment for humans, you must first create a livable environment for the plants needed. Obvious solution - use rad-resistant plants as part of an initial program for building up the environment.
Once you've got an artificial environment that is biologically stable and sustaining good O:CO2 ratios for plantlife, you can look to advancing that environment. I'd suggest having a two layer dome, with the gap between the inner dome and outer dome flooded at as high a pressure as the domes can take something that'll filter the radiation. By having an organic system that can cope, you can take your time getting it right. Regardless of what is actually done, these plants will provide a rich topsoil that will be valuable to the plants that are actually needed by humans.
Probably multiploid (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Can atheists refute one simple fact? (Score:2, Interesting)
Anything that had a beginning must have been caused by something else
You fail right there.
Re:er what (Score:1, Interesting)
If the DNA was stretched out, and unpacked, then yes, it could be that tall. The DNA in each one of your cells, and in turn, each one of the cells of this plant, is highly packed through the use of histones (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histones) and supercoiling. So what would take a great deal of space, ends up being quite small. That is also how you get those wonderful little shapes of the chromosomes as well. Not all the DNA needs to be exposed all the time. When the time comes to transcribe, then it is uncoiled. But until then, this massive genome is packed up nice and tight.
Being a molecular biologist does the body a world of good!
Re:So lots of things. (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, a large genome generally means lots of redundancy. Lots of redundancy is theorized to mean high resistance to radiation.
Another reason why plants have large genomes is that they tend to duplicate their genomes. One theory is that it makes speciation easier.
Mind you, it's not as if the designer said, "I'll duplicate plant genomes to make it easier for them to separate into species." They just duplicate and it works out well.
Apparently plants can double their genomes without the disasterous consequences that it has in animal cells. Animal cells don't double their entire genome unless they're really messed up, like in cancer, and then they're swiftly disposed of.
Re:Can atheists refute one simple fact? (Score:3, Interesting)
What about Carl Sagan's argument?
He argued (in 'Cosmos') that if it was necessary to postulate a cause for the universe, it was necessary to postulate a cause for whatever caused the universe, and if it was not necessary to claim there was a cause for "God", it was also not necessary to claim a cause for the universe. But not 15 pages before he made that claim, he discussed the old Steady State theory and how it was succeeded by the Big Bang model. Sagan allowed the steady state to be causeless, since there was no first moment for an infinitely old universe. But if that's true, Dr. Sagan was also arguing that a 'Big Bang' type universe had a special reason for needing a cause that the Steady State version did not. He was claiming that it was sufficient in one case for science to simply say that not everything has to have a cause, but in the other case that science was only specifically able to skip reasoning about the cause of a thing because it did not have an origin. Why then was it fair to allow the steady state to be causeless, but demand that God must have a cause if the current (Big Bang) model must have a cause? Wouldn''t "God" be more like the steady state than the big bang (at least as most religions define God)? Why did Carl Sagan reason from Anything that had a beginning must have been caused by something else to conclude that something that had no beginning didn't need a first cause, and then reject the very same idea not 15 pages later? Why did he treat a question as strictly rhetorical when he in fact had given a straight, non-rhetorical answer to it not 15 pages before?
So, going by the way the first post was modded and responded to, Carl Sagan was nothing better than a slashtroll who made us all dumber. Personally, I disagreed with him on several points, but thought he was legitimately brilliant and certainly worthy of publication. I guess I should adopt some of your attitudes and burn his books instead.
Fact: Dozens of distinguished scientists in the 1930s and 40s pointed to the Steady State model as a positive disproof of God, and fought against accepting the Big Bang model because they claimed it was bringing religious superstition back into science. Not one of them was willing to admit after the Big Bang won out by actual evidence that they had been wrong to interpret the science that way. Most of them, when pressed on it, stipulated two things: 1) That even if the Steady State and Big Bang theories were opposite in their predictions in just about every other respect, they were not opposite in their implications about religion, and 2) that the Big Bang would not be a scientific theory unless it shared the common property of disproving the existence of God.
I see several logical flaws in the initial post. In particular, the claim that an actual infinite cannot exist is highly suspect. A lot of the post is rehashed Augustine, and the debate about Augustine's reasoning has echoed through philosophy for over a millennium now. Some of it borrows from Pascal, but then, most people don't reject Pascal's contributions to probability theory and logic just because there are flaws with "Pascal's Wager". However, the refutations here are just as flawed, if not more-so, and I've seen some brilliant men make the same sort of errors many of you are mocking, in the modern era. If you're not prepared to stoop to Karma mods and dumb one-liners for them, maybe some of you just might want to set yourself a better standard here.
Not under Wikipedia's watch! (Score:2, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome#Comparison_of_different_genome_sizes [wikipedia.org]
Which one is trustworthy?