When UC Santa Cruz postdoctoral scholar Merly Escalona assembled the first-ever reference genome for the Stephen Colbert Trapdoor Spider, she was shocked by the dataset’s unexpectedly large size. For a small invertebrate, this California native spider’s genetic code was very fragmented and consisted of about four billion bases (four gigabases)—larger than the human genome’s size of a little more than three gigabases.
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Source: Phys.org