Your Christmas Tree Has Seven Times More DNA Than You Do!

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091215171514.htm

ScienceDaily (Dec. 21, 2009) — Take a close look at your Christmas tree -- it has seven times more genetic material (DNA) than you do! Why this is so is still largely unknown, but now the DNA of the spruce is going to be mapped by Swedish researchers from Umeå Plant Science Center (a collaboration between the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) and Umeå University), the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), and the Karolinska Institute (KI), with the aid of a SEK 75 million grant from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation.

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Apparently conifers managed as early as 300 million years ago to create an extremely successful genetic make-up that has allowed them to dominate the globe, but what does it look like? All conifers have twelve chromosomes, but they are extremely large: a cell from a spruce or pine has seven times as much DNA as a human cell does. Why do conifers have so much DNA? Does it have to do with their having thrived for millions of years on earth, and do they really have more genes than you and I, or are their genes simply more 'diluted'? This is not known, but their enormous amount of DNA has entailed that scientists have not dared to tackle a mapping of the complete genome of coniferous trees.

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