Your Christmas Tree Has Seven Times More DNA than You Do!

(From Science Daily) Take a close look at your Christmas tree — it has seven times more genetic material (DNA) than you do! Why this is so is still largely unknown, but now the DNA of the spruce is going to be mapped by Swedish researchers from Umeå Plant Science Center (a collaboration between the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) and Umeå University), the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), and the Karolinska Institute (KI), with the aid of a SEK 75 million grant from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation.

Coniferous trees have dominated major parts of the earth for hundreds of millions of years. When primitive batrachians crawled around Carbon Age forests, they were surrounded by conifers. Conifers survived the geological disaster 250 million years ago that paved the way for the age of the dinosaurs. When the impact of a meteorite wiped out the dinosaurs, conifers lived on. Today conifers dominate major regions of the earth — the combined weight of all the people on earth is less than that of the conifers in Jämtland County in central Sweden.

Read more here: Your Christmas Tree Has Seven Times More DNA than You Do!