• Question: How many chromosomes does a wheat plant have? Why does it need more DNA than us?

    Asked by to Ricardo on 17 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Ricardo Ramirez

      Ricardo Ramirez answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      Hi,
      Wheat has 42 chromosomes, 4 less than human. However, some of the chromosomes are as large as the whole size of the human genome. The difference, is that humans are diploids (we get a pair of each of the 22 chromosomes, plus XX or XY), pasta wheat is tetra plod (4 copies) bread wheat is hexaploid (6 copies) . This happens because plants are more tolerant to cross between species. In particular, some grasses (wheat, rice and maize are all grasses!) can “hybridise”, so when you cross two of them, instead of getting half of the genes from each parent, they end up with a full copy of both parent species. In bread wheat this happened at least two times.

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