• Question: why do tomatoes have more genes than us

    Asked by esther to Dan, David, Dawn, Sian on 22 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Dawn Lau

      Dawn Lau answered on 22 Jun 2016:

      The number of genes doesn’t correlate with how complex the organism is. Remember those trousers you could zip off below the knee to make capris, or zip off even higher to become shorts? Human genes are like that. Some genes have many ways they can be processed when they make proteins, so that the function is different even if you only have one gene. Some time ago, the tomato genome was triplicated randomly – some genes were removed through evolution later on but some extra ones from the triplication remained. So it’s most likely that tomatoes just have more genes that perform different functions, as opposed to humans having “zipper-trouser” genes (we call that alternative splicing).

    • Photo: Sian Thomas

      Sian Thomas answered on 22 Jun 2016:

      Good answer Dawn. Nothing to add.

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