• Question: what is the most genetically complex animal?

    Asked by Ten3ka to Andy, Chris, Harriet, Jess, Nikki on 14 Mar 2016.
    • Photo: Harriet Reid

      Harriet Reid answered on 14 Mar 2016:

      Hi

      The water flea, has the largest number of genes of any animal (as far as I know). The complexity or number of genes that an organism has doesn’t necessary tell you how complex the organism is going to be.

      Check out the water flea here: https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=118530

    • Photo: Christopher Blanford

      Christopher Blanford answered on 14 Mar 2016:

      Hi Ten3ka

      I was going to take a completely different direction from Harriet. Like she writes, having loads of genes doesn’t mean more complex. We humans have a lot of ‘junk’ DNA. We don’t know what it does, if anything.

      The other side is very interesting, though. What’s the smallest number of genes (or bits of DNA) that you can have and still have life. A guy named Craig Venter has a lab that has been looking into this. They think just 256 genes are needed. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_genome

      Then you have viruses. Some of them have tiny amount of DNA or RNA, like 100x less. They can’t reproduce on their own (they need a living organism to do that), so they’re really somewhere between biochemistry and life as we normally think of it.

      Chris

    • Photo: Nikki D'Arcy

      Nikki D'Arcy answered on 14 Mar 2016:

      Yes, the water flea genome is scientifically the most complex and onions have more DNA than humans….

      However, despite us having the same amount of genes as a lot of ‘lower organisms’ our genes can do this awesome thing called ‘alternative-splicing’. This means that genes can make more than one protein depending on where the ribosome starts synthesizing. This means we make more out of what we have got basically!

    • Photo: Jessica Groppi

      Jessica Groppi answered on 15 Mar 2016:

      Hi!

      I guess the human, though I might be wrong.

      Jess.

    • Photo: andy chapman

      andy chapman answered on 15 Mar 2016:

      eh…I’m a chemist…get me out of here. Thanks biochemistry guys.

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