A Look At Biodiversity Through The Eyes of DNA

DNA has the ability to introduce facts about a species way of life with one simple strand. Hanna Landenmark who is obtaining a doctorate in astrobiology at the University of Edinburgh is looking into global biodiversity by the means of DNA. By examining the number of plants, animals, microbes, fungi, and even viruses, Landenmark and her colleagues formatted the biomass of each of the size of the organisms and the amount currently living. Their next step was figuring out how many cells were in these entities and multiplying that number by the count of DNA in the cell. The results from the researchers (Landenmark, Forgan, Cockell) stated in PLOSBiology journal “Earth contains around 50 trillion trillion trillion DNA base pairs — the building blocks of DNA’s double helix — plus or minus 3.6 x 10³⁷ base pairs.” That amount of DNA weighs up to 50 billion tons all together.

Earth’s DNA transcription rate was calculated also by the researchers, resulting in the ability to process DNA by 10²⁴ subunits each second. The information obtained by the researchers is simply an introductory data for calculations that could give more definite numbers by knowing the complete amount of animals in certain ecosystems and the size and amount of copies in genomes of species. These statistics have yet to become available.

DNA has been a prominent aspect for the scientific community for understanding our past, present, and future. The idea of determining how much DNA is truly on this planet I think will help discovering species that have not yet been classified. The start of this research has opened up a huge field of opportunities for the future of DNA research.