- 884 megabases, or roughly 1/4 of the human genome, at 86% completion.
- 40k predicted genes, which is a bit higher than that originally predicted for humans, and twice what is currently accepted for humans. This number was confirmed by RNA-Seq, meaning these genes were actually expressed as mRNA, so are likely real.
- About 25% of genes are alternatively spiced, compared to 50% of human genes.
- two genome duplications
- autotetraploid, so have 4 copies of each chromosome, leading to some difficulties with breeding
- 3k genes which define the potato family
- "acute inbreeding depression", meaning it's suffering intense problems like disease susceptibility because of how long we've been mono-farming the original few strains imported to Europe from South America.
- >62.2% of the genome is repetitive and will likely make the remaining 14% of the genome hard to sequence.
There are of course many other bewildering things about the plant, as seems to be the case in general in plant biology. Mendel was very lucky to study the particular traits in a particular species that managed to behave according to simple (Mendelian) genetics. Many other plant quirks take some getting used to.
No comments:
Post a Comment