Potatoes have more chromosomes than humans.

The common cultivated potato, known scientifically as Solanum tuberosum, is a tetraploid organism. This means it possesses four sets of 12 chromosomes, totaling 48. In contrast, humans are diploid and have two sets of 23 chromosomes for a total of 46. This difference highlights that the number of chromosomes is not a measure of an organism's complexity or evolutionary advancement.The phenomenon where an organism has more than two complete sets of chromosomes is called polyploidy. It is extremely common in the plant kingdom and often results in larger cell sizes and more robust physical characteristics. While the standard potato has 48 chromosomes, some wild species in the Solanum genus are hexaploid, carrying up to 72 or even 96 chromosomes.Geneticists have found that genome size and chromosome count vary wildly across the tree of life. For example, the adder's-tongue fern holds the record for the highest chromosome count with approximately 1,260. Meanwhile, some species of ants have only a single pair of chromosomes. These variations are the result of historical genome duplications and evolutionary mutations over millions of years.The potato genome was first sequenced in 2011 by the Potato Genome Sequencing Consortium, a team of international scientists. Their research published in the journal Nature revealed that the potato has about 39,000 protein-coding genes. This is significantly more than the roughly 20,000 to 25,000 genes found in the human genome, further proving that genetic quantity does not equal functional complexity.