• Question: what animal has the largest dna strand in the animal kingdom

    Asked by skelly to Katherine on 23 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Katherine Haxton

      Katherine Haxton answered on 23 Mar 2012:

      That’s a difficult one! The DNA from a single human cell would be about 2 metres long if all of it was layed end to end. A good measure of how much genetic information different species have is by measuring the size of their genome. That’s DNA for most creatures, all the genetic information. Genome size is measured in base pairs and the biggest according to wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome ) that we know of right now is for an amoeba (a single cell lifeform), 670,000,000,000 base pairs. Humans have around 3,200,000,000
      Scientists are still working to sequence the DNA of other animals so it may be some time before we know the answer to this question.

Comments

  • Photo: Darren

    Darren commented on :

    This is a really great question. Technically chromosomes are each independent DNA strands, so its not entirely clear what the *single* longest DNA strand is in the animal kindom. Human chromosome 1 has about 300 million bases, which is pretty massive. I don’t know of a longer chromosome on another animal, but I bet there probably is one!