I had not paused to consider what a huge hassle tetraploidy can be for creating better potato varieties. Makes sense. So I was all the more surprised to learn that researchers can create a haploid plant by eliminating chromosomes from the pollen grain and then doubling the chromosomes of that haploid plant to create a dihaploid plant.The end goal is a population of plants with reduced genetic complexity and thereby more easily studied and maintained agriculturally desirable traits.
Many of you no doubt think this is old news to many of you who already knew this but it is new news to many of us who are older than you and never knew it. (But you already knew that.)
Nevertheless, despite the problems which come with tetraploidy, it has always struck me as very cool. (Pardon the technical term.) I recall an article I read some years ago about creating much larger and faster-growing switchgrass biofuel varieties for electricity generation by inducing tetraploidy in those species already under agricultural cultivation.
Indeed. I’ll never forget seeing “The Invasion of the Tetratetracontaploids” at a struggling, run-down drive-in theater in 1959. (The original working title for the screenplay was “The Invasion of the Stonecrop Sedum Succulents” but it just didn’t carry the same punch.)
I asked my subscription-but-well-worth-it Gemini Advanced what is the highest confirmed number of chromosome sets in any organism and it said 1260, as found in the adder’s tongue fern, Ophioglossum reticulatum.
Of course, I couldn’t resist asking the A.I. engine for the term which applied to 1260-degree polyploidy. So now I know that the aforementioned adder’s tongue fern is dodecacontatetraploid.
I heard that banning polyploidy from America’s public schools was a plank in an early draft of Project 2025 but there was much in-fighting over the exact wording of how much polyploidy was too much polyploidy. (Attorney @Puck_Mendelssohn will recall that Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart unhelpfully remarked, “I know it when I see it.”) When the plank was dropped entirely, Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis blamed it on “compromising Christians” on the Project 2025 drafting committee. He explained that excessive polyploidy was a result of the Adamic Fall and that pretty soon any organism whatsoever would be allowed to identify with whatever degree of polyploidy he/she/it/them/n^n happened to choose—regardless of actual genetics. The LGBTQIA2S+ community promptly added the letter “P” to their ponderous acronym and Donald Trump quickly declared that the issue of polyploidy under his administration would be left to the states. J.D. Vance reacted with, “Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them polyploids.”, and then continued his floundering attempt at ordering donuts.
When Donald Trump heard that Ophioglossum reticulatum was found to have more sets of chromosomes than he did, he called it “fake news” and insisted that he actually had millions more— and that everyone would know that if only they had been counted fairly. Rudy Giuliani promptly filed lawsuits challenging the counts published in 62 peer-reviewed journals.
As for me, I am old enough to remember the good ol’ days when mere tetrapolyploidy was plenty enough for anybody. (And whatever polyploidy someone decided to do in the privacy of their own home was nobody’s business but theirs.)
I never saw it back in its day—but caught it years later on the original Mystery Science Theater 3000 when Joel Hodgson was the only actual polyploid on the satellite.
Which shows that you should never put your faith in an LLM, even a subscription one. I was curious enough to look up Ophioglossum reticulatum in Wikipedia, and found that it was a hexaploid species. Given that Wikipedia is itself not-exactly-cast-iron, I checked it’s source and the abstract of one of it’s source’s source (with all the recent hoopla about papers relying on retracted sources, I’m a touch paranoid).
The 1260 number appears to be its chromosome-count (a multiple of six, for hexaploid), which I’ve seen differing numbers in different sources. It seems that Gemini confused number of chromosomes with number of chromosome sets.
Which raises the obvious question of who let the cat out of the bag? Inquiring minds want to know.
The book The Brethren, about the inner life of the Court, recounts the joking that went on during porno cases. The justices and their clerks would have these “movie nights,” basically, where they reviewed the stuff which was involved in the case under review. Apparently the clerks were prone to remark, whenever something particularly unsettling happened on screen, “That’s it! I know it when I see it!”
