Monday, June 16, 2014

Genome sizes

This is a nice (and correct) one from Wikipedia. 

Also about animals with the smallest and largest genomes:
I have seen both some of the largest and smallest genomes among animals (well, I have seen stain bound to their DNA, at least). The largest report remains that of the marbled African lungfish, Protopterus aethiopicus, at a gigantic 132Gb (about 40 times more than humans). Some authors argue that this is an overestimate, but regardless they have huge genomes that are undoubtedly much, much larger than those of any mammal.
Until recently, the smallest animal genome size was reported to occur in some root-knot nematodes of the genus Meloidogyne (~ 30Mb) or perhaps in the placozoan Trichoplax adhaerens (~ 40Mb). I tended to have doubts about the nematode estimates because they were derived using older methodology. However, my colleague Serge Morand and his co-authors now report an even smaller genome in a plant-parasitic nematode based on estimates using modern flow cytometry techniques. In particular, the genome size of Pratylenchus coffeae is estimated at about 19Mb, making it the smallest so far found in a metazoan.

Tree of life (total gene number)

Look at this picture, how insignificant we are in the world of species!

Had fun trying this website: http://itol.embl.de/itol.cgi



Shoot... Spent so much time getting the pictures, just realized that the website was wrong about "genome size"! That's # of genes, not genome size... Thank god that I asked it to show the labels... Can these people please have a better idea about genome biology?! This picture is even on Wikipedia! That's very misleading!



Embarrassed...

Went back to read my posts in the past. The language was really unpolished and full of errors here and there. Was going to delete them but had second thought: why hide the process of growing up?