Environmental Science lecturer, Dr Steven Dodsworth, contributed to the paper alongside other researchers from the UK, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Spain and China. Funding for the research paper was secured from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), the Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación in Spain and the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS).

The final paper has been published by Nature Plants – a monthly scientific journal.

Steven, who worked on the subject of plant genomes as part of his PhD, joined the University of Bedfordshire’s School of Life Sciences in 2018. Course Co-ordinator for the undergraduate Biological Science course, he also teaches a variety of modules across the department, including ecology, genetics and applied plant science.

Working in collaboration with the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and the Institute of Plant Molecular Biology (IPMB) in the Czech Republic, Steven investigated how the genetic makeup of a species varies – specifically how the proportion of repetitive DNA changes – depending on the size of its genome. A genome is an organism’s complete set of genetic instructions – the information needed to build a species and allow it to grow and evolve.

New Brief Communication: "Repeat-sequence turnover shifts fundamentally in species with large genomes" https://t.co/TIyl3sx7CR

"We reveal a fundamental change in repeat turnover in genomes above 10 Gbp, such that species with the largest genomes are only about 55% repetitive." pic.twitter.com/v2BJnuYLK7

— Nature Plants (@NaturePlants) October 19, 2020

This research is important for obtaining a better understanding of how a plant species’ growth, survival and toleration of extreme environments is altered depending on the size of their genetic composition. The study was comprehensive, ranging from the smallest plant genome – with 63 million letters of DNA code – to one the largest, which has 86 billion letters of DNA code. For scale, a human being has around 3 billion letters of DNA code.

Steven has long been interested in how genomes work and hopes the project will help bring the importance of genome diversity to wider audiences. Of the project, he said:

I have been particularly interested in how genetic variation relates to what we see in the natural world, and the number of different species that have evolved different characteristics.

Plants are a fantastic system to study, because they have such incredible genetic and genomic diversity, and are fundamental for sustaining all life on this planet — from the air we breathe and the food we eat, to our clothes and medicines, our built environment and the natural environments we so desperately require for our mental and physical well-being.

Steven also thanked his collaborative researchers and the funding they received for making the project possible. He continued:

Funding for this project was essential for us to do the required DNA sequencing, the computational infrastructure to support the analysis of the data, as well as support staff who contributed to this project over a number of years.

I feel strongly that it is important for researchers to collaborate both nationally and internationally. This kind of collaborative network brings together complementary expertise, as well as access to different resources and new ways of thinking.

One of his collaborators was Dr Ilia Leitch, Senior Research Leader at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew. She has described the research as looking into ‘the dark side of the genome’ and noted her pleasure at working alongside the University of Bedfordshire academic on the project.

She said:

Collaboration is really essential to research given that it brings together a diversity of dimensions of understanding and expertise, and increases the amount and breadth of data that can be generated and analysed when addressing a particular biological question.

Steven played an important role – bringing his bio-informatic skills and biological insights to bear on understanding the biology of repeat dynamics in plants. Ongoing collaborations with Steven on various research projects are likely to deliver further exciting discoveries to increase our understanding of the biological significance of repetitive DNA sequences.

In terms of this particular research paper that we’ve worked together on, it is important as it enables, for the first time, a biologically meaningful comparative analysis of repeats across the diversity of genome sizes encountered in plants and has revealed that the dynamics of repeat evolution are not uniform but instead influenced by genome size.

This research highlights a role for genome size itself (independent of the DNA sequence) in influencing the evolutionary trajectory of species.

Read the full research paper ‘Repeat-sequence turnover shifts fundamentally in species with large genomes’ via Nature Plants here.

The School of Life Sciences sits within the University’s STEM Building at the Luton campus, offering students access to modern, well-equipped engineering laboratories and three specialist analytical laboratories for life sciences teaching and research. It also provides a dedicated space for cell culture, analytical chemistry and DNA sequencing, and gives students hands-on access to robotic equipment including humanoid robots, robotic arms and wheeled robotic platforms.

For more information on studying Life Sciences at the University of Bedfordshire, visit:
www.beds.ac.uk/howtoapply/departments/department-of-life-sciences/