LOGAN, Utah, March 18 -- Utah State University issued the following news release:
Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes and 46 total chromosomes. Half come from your mother and the other half come from your father. We're a diploid species, meaning most of our chromosomes come in matched sets.
Plants are a different story. Unlike in animals, polyploidy - having more than two sets of chromosomes - is very common among plants.
Polyploidy, says Utah State University plant biologist Carl Rothfels, is a dominant feature of existing plant species and appears to be a driver of plant diversity. Advances in genomics techniques, including CRISPR, are fueling study of the phenomenon, he says, yet polyploid phylogenetics, the study of the evolutionary ...