The olive tree is twice as complicated as a human

Imagine an olive tree with its thin leaves and gnarled branches… This tree is one of the most beautiful and noble in the Mediterranean. Its fruits are the daily food of Spaniards, and the volume of olive oil production in Spain is three million tons per year.

And here is another fact that will shock your consciousness: twice as many genes have been found in the genome of the olive tree as in the human body.

The human genome is a collection of hereditary material enclosed in a human cell. It is known that the human genome contains about 28,000 genes. Researchers at the Center for Genomic Technologies (CRG) in Barcelona in 2016 decoded the complete genome of the olive tree and discovered 56,000 genes! The specimen of the olive tree for the study had an age of 1300 years. The olive tree is one of the first trees that were grown in the history of mankind about 6,000 years ago, but until now the olive tree gene was not known, which regulates the differences between varieties, size and taste of olives and why they live so long. The discovery will make this ancient tree invulnerable to infections.