Biochemistry 2280A Lecture Notes - Genome Size, Eukaryote, Nucleosome

• School: Western University
• Department: Biochemistry
• Course: Biochemistry 2280A
• Professor: Prof

Document Summary

There are two main orders of life on earth: prokarya (meaning before nucleus ) and eukarya (meaning. Prokaryotes are organisms that fall under the prokarya classification and a notable example of such life forms are bacteria. Eukaryotes are organisms that fall under the eukarya classification and notable examples of such life forms are plants, animals and fungi. It is important to understand that genome complexity does not necessarily correlate with the complexity of the organism. Onion plants have a greater genome size for expression than do human beings. However, there is a wide variation of the base pair sequences examined from organism to organism. The major difference between eukaryotes and prokaryotes is the fact that eukaryotes possess a nucleosome whereas prokaryotes do not. Prokaryotes have thick, rigid, cell walls, while eukaryotes can either have cell walls (in the case of plants and fungi) or not (in the case of mammalian species).