Japanese canopy plant (Paris japonica)Martin Schneebeli / WikimediaMore than twelve percent of the world’s known plant species can be found on the manicured grounds of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Add 300 acres, 250 years of British history, nearly two million visitors annually, and greenhouses that resemble glass castles, and one can only imagine how overwhelmed Jaume Pellicer, a newly minted PhD originally from a village on Spain’s Mediterranean coast, felt when he arrived to work at Kew.
“This was shocking to me,” says Pellicer, who’s still perfecting his English, “like I was a tiny point in a new world.” Surrounded by a staff of 800, mostly plant specialists and scientists, Pellicer was more or less another anonymous technician, but in less than a year the 32-year-old had discovered the largest genome ever recorded. It was sitting in a flowerpot inside Kew’s Davies Alpine House.
For six months Pellicer had the tedious task of mincing countless leaves with a razor blade to extract DNA and measure genome sizes in the Melanthiaceae family, a group of flowering perennial herbs. His team at Kew was trying to learn exactly when in the plant family’s evolution genomes began to expand in size. After measuring a procession ...
