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Giant bacterium carries thousands of copies of its genome

nature.com — It seems like a peculiar case of genomic overkill: a single-celled bacterium has been found that keeps tens of thousands of copies of its genome.

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  • pervezalammzn, on 05/11/2008, -6/+1gud :)
  • maeon3, on 05/11/2008, -2/+22The devil put in 200,000 copies of it's genome into the Epulopiscium to test your faith.
    • cdigioia, on 05/11/2008, -1/+4Son of a bitch
    • tdawson2012, on 05/11/2008, -1/+1Thats just the way jesus made it sir! He must have used too much magic powder on that one!
    • smartass007, on 05/11/2008, -2/+2stop pulling the pacifier out of their mouths and yanking away their cuddly security blanket. you don't want to unravel the entire social fabric of a capitalistic, god fearin' country, do you?
    • sanman, on 05/11/2008, -0/+1each copy was implanted by a noodly appendage of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
  • cplusplus, on 05/11/2008, -1/+5I thought David Blaine held the record for most genomes. I saw it on Oprah.
  • goscript, on 05/11/2008, -2/+3Until now, the record for the ‘most genomes’ in a bacterium was held by Buchnera aphidicola, which is found in aphids and carts around an average of 120 genomes. But Esther Angert of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and her colleagues now report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 1 that Epulopiscium, a gargantuan bacterium that lives in the intestines of unicornfish, contains up to 200,000 copies of its genome.
  • XZanatos, on 05/12/2008, -0/+2A computer analogy for this bacterium would be: a multicore distributed processing scheme with all the cores running the same program.
    • kurtu5, on 05/13/2008, -0/+1A ribosomes are to a processor as a _______ is to a DNA genome.
      a) parrot
      b) remote
      c) hard disk application
      d) cheese cutter

      How about a huge cabinet of hard drives, each with the same copy of XP on it and a few processors running it instead?
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