Dhaka the 15th of Nov., ’13. In the May 22 issue of Nature, a report
on the sequencing of the 30 meter tall Norway Spruce, Picea abies popularly known as Christmas tree in Europe has been published.
Its genome study by as many as 55 scientists belonging mostly to Swedish, Italian and Belgian institutes has revealed that it consists
of 20 billion nitrogenous bases – six times larger than the human genome. Almost at the same time the genome of another conifer, namely, Pinus taeda has been sequenced and was found to be
4-billion base longer than the genome size of Picea abies i.e., 24
billion. Although initially it was considered to be a gigantic task to embark on this ambitious project but the recent advancement of
the sequencing tool such as those supplied by 454 Life Sciences
has made it possible to accomplish it and that
also within a limited time and budget.