BEAUTY AND DIVERSITY: With 150 billion base pairs, Paris japonica boasts the largest known eukaryotic genome—50 times the size of the human genome.ALPSDAKE/WIKIMEDIA
What do cells, genes, mutations, transposons, RNA silencing, and DNA recombination have in common? All were discovered first in plants.
It sounds grandiose, but it’s true, and plant biologists delight in reminding others of these plant-derived breakthroughs. The first cell observed under a microscope, back in the mid-1660s by physicist Robert Hooke, was a plant cell in a slice of cork. Botanist Robert Brown first named the nucleus after observing opaque spots inside orchid cells. The saintly father of genetics, Gregor Mendel, defined the laws of inheritance by studying pea plants. The list goes on.
Today, with the advent of high-throughput sequencing, that legacy of firsts in the plant field is extending to genomics research. In the tens of millions of nucleic acids of familiar ...
