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scientist have sequence the largest bang beast genome — and it ’s 30 times bigger than the human genome .
The genome go to the South American lungfish ( Lepidosiren paradoxa ) , a primeval , atmosphere - breathingfishthat " hops " onto land from the water using uncanny , arm - like Little Phoebe . The fish ’s DNA code elaborate dramatically over the past 100 million years of evolutionary history , single-foot up the equivalent of one human genome every 10 million days , researchers found .
The South American lungfish has the largest genome out of any animal tested.
The findings could shed luminosity on how genomes expand across the tree of aliveness .
Lungfish are sometimes called " live fogey " because they have existed for hundred of zillion of years . They are thought to be themost closely tie in coinage to the first tetrapods , theancestor of all craniate . These ancestor likely sprouted limbs and crawled onto land around 370 million years ago during the Devonian time period , ( 419 million to 359 million years ago),Science reported .
antecedently , scientists sequence the genomes of other lungfish species , including the Australian lungfish ( Neoceratodus forsteri ) . Next on the list were the African lungfish ( Protopterus annectens ) and ( L. paradoxa ) , whose genome is doubly the sizing of its air - breathing relation from other continents .
The team described the South American lungfish genome Aug. 14 in the journalNature . It turn out , these line - breathing Pisces bear a whopping 91 billion basis pairs , or letters , of DNA in their genomes .
That ’s enough letter to replete 100,000 books . Yet only 20,000 genes in reality code for proteins , meaning the eternal rest may be mostly junk , the subject area find . More than 90 % of the transmissible material was made oftransposable elements(TEs ) , or highly repetitious " jumping " cistron that were copied from elsewhere in the genome .
The scientist also determine whylungfish genomes expanded so precipitously over the retiring 100 million years . It turns out that the South American lungfish had central genes that suppress ti , which organisms may have inherited from viruses long ago .
carry around so much genetic baggage can be knotty .
" This must be a Brobdingnagian price to the animal,“Axel Meyer , an evolutionary life scientist at the University of Konstanz , severalize Science Magazine . " All but one of this lungfish ’s 19 chromosome is the size of the entire human genome , so it call for a lot of vim to copy that DNA . And the core group and cell that encase it must be big . "
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On the other paw , the extra desoxyribonucleic acid can come in handy when animals need to adjust to changing environments , Meyer sound out . That ’s because TEs can rage up or down the face of genes , allowing for more rapid adjustment .
While the lungfish may hold the book for the with child do it brute genome , it does n’t contain the gravid genome overall . That honor belongs to aweird fern that harbors 160 billion letter in its genome — more than 50 times the letters found in human cells .
And this particular lungfish may not be the record holder for the largest animal genome for long . The marbleized lungfish ( Protopterus aethiopicus ) may have a genome 50 % bigger than this one , Claus - Peter Stelzer , an evolutionary life scientist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria who was not imply in the study , told Science . Of course , the species will postulate its genome sequenced before that can be confirmed .
