this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024
180 points (97.4% liked)
Asklemmy
43962 readers
1587 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
They do! Though I think their genome is a lot simpler
Oh man, sometimes yes but sometimes not so much. Know how humans have 23 chromosomes? And we're diploid, which means they come in pairs of 2?
Some plants have a few more pairs than that - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyploidy And some plants have way WAY more than 23 chromosomes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organisms_by_chromosome_count There's a plant at the bottom of that list that has 1260 chromosomes.
I only took 1 botany class back in college, so I don't know or remember enough to talk about this in more depth. I really only know enough to be shocked by how crazy a plant's genuine can be.
The way I've had it explained to me, plants as a general rule have a much, much larger genome than animals. The reason is simple. When an animal runs into a problem like not enough water, it can just get up and move. Plants are rooted where they are, prey to whatever comes along. They have to develop an arsenal of genes to deal with different situations, whether that's drought resistance or producing various toxins so that animals don't make a meal of them. It's not like animals don't do this to some degree - the immune system is incredibly elaborate - but not as much.
Whoa, very interesting! Biology is so fascinating
Except for onions, ironically.