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P.2 right column bottom paragraph: "Together with angiosperms, gymnosperm trees (in particular conifers) are an important hallmark of past and current terrestrial habitats. Conifers are interesting in terms of socio-economy because the oldest and largest individuals known are among them. Moreover, they are an evolutionary enigma because a small number of species covers about half of the land masses. Two thirds of the c. 1000 gymnosperm species are conifers (Christenhusz et al., 2011). Although the average angiosperm genome is 588 Mbp large, the average gymnosperm genome size is 15.48 Gbp (primary source), although most of them are not known to be polyploid – the inflated genome size is thus probably mainly due to high transposon activity. Maybe the longevity of the conifers is rooted in different genome structure and function. To date, [investigators] do not know much about somatic mutations and epigenetic acclimation of conifers (Avramidou et al., 2015)." |