Ilia Leitch
Ilia Leitch, senior research leader at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, is a plant genomics expert researching the origin, evolution and biological significance of the enormous genomic diversity witnessed across the plant kingdom, as well as how genomic characters impact how, when, and where plants grow and respond to global change. At Kew, Ilia leads a team of scientists investigating character evolution in plants, focusing on identifying and understanding how different plant traits interact and evolve, and how key characters influence or are influenced by global environmental change. Ilia is also involved in the Plant Tree of Life project, which is building an evolution tree of all ~13,600 flowering plant genera; the Darwin Tree of Life Project that is sequencing the genomes of all eukaryotic species in Britain and Ireland; and she maintains the Plant DNA C-values database, the largest genome size database on the web, with genome size data for more than 12,000 plant species.
Largest plant genome
The largest genome (i.e., total amount of DNA in the nucleus of a cell) for a plant – as well as for any organism assessed to date using best-practice methods – is 160.45 billion base pairs (Gbp, or gigabases), for the Tmesipteris oblanceolata fork fern. It is native to tropical forests in the French overseas territory of New Caledonia and other nearby islands, such as Vanuatu, in the south-west Pacific Ocean. This fern boasts over 50 times more genetic material than that found in the nuclei of human cells (3.2 Gbp). The findings were published in the journal iScience on 31 May 2024.
Image credit: Pol Fernandez / RBG, Kew