chloroplast genome

genome size

genomic

New Phytologist

In recent decades, interest in plant genome size (i.e. the total amount of DNA in the unreplicated haploid nucleus; Greilhuber et al., 2005) has been growing exponentially as the biological, evolutionary and ecological significance of this key biodiversity trait is increasingly recognized (e.g. see reviews by Greilhuber & Leitch, 2013; Pellicer et al., 2018). Such interest is no doubt, in part, underpinned by the staggering diversity of genome sizes encountered within land plants (e.g. especially angiosperms which show a range of c. 2400-fold; Pellicer et al., 2010) and the considerable diversity in some algal clades, with the most variable being in the Chlorophyta clade of green algae, which have a range of 274-fold. Certainly, it is now clear that genome size can have an impact at many scales, from influencing gene and genome dynamics (e.g. Dodsworth et al., 2015) to playing a role at the whole-plant level, influencing, for example, plant growth strategies, plant community composition, plant–animal interactions, evolutionary trajectories and ecosystem dynamics (e.g. Suda et al., 2015; Guignard et al., 2016, 2019; Simonin & Roddy, 2018). In the era of fast-evolving high-throughput-sequencing technologies, C-values also provide baseline information necessary for estimating whole-genome sequencing costs, as these are directly linked to the size of the genome (e.g. Li & Harkess, 2018). Although genome size data have been accumulating in the literature since 1951 when the first estimate for a plant was published (Ogur et al., 1951), for many years such data remained scattered across the literature or compiled into lists available only in hard copy (e.g. Bennett & Smith, 1976; Bennett et al., 2000). This made the search to determine whether a particular genome size was available slow and tedious. Release 1 of the Plant DNA C-values database in 2001 contributed significantly to overcoming such a bottleneck and helped to revolutionize the field by facilitating large-scale comparative phylogenetic analyses across differ...

The Plant DNA C‐values database (release 7.1): an updated online repository of plant genome size data for comparative studies