Chapter 11, Problem 2P

Summary Introduction

To analyze:

The term “haploid” is normally used to describe archaeal and bacterial genomes, but some bacterial genomes have more than one chromosome in the genome, and some archaeal cells possess extra copy of the chromosome. Under such conditions, whether the term “haploid” disputes or not, with the presence of multiple copies of chromosome in archaeal genomes or bacterial genomes.

Introduction:

The structure that holds the genetic material inside a cell is termed as chromosome. Within a bacterial cell, the nucleoid region is present, which contains highly condensed chromosomes. Most of the prokaryotes possess a circular chromosome while some species of prokaryotes possess a linear chromosome. The length of a normal chromosome is around few million bp (base pair), e.g., the length of chromosomes in E.coli is around $\text{4}\text{.6}$ million base pairs. The size of chromosomes of archaea differs over and above a tenfold range. Archaea are haploids and similar to bacteria possess a genome usually containing a single chromosome that is commonly circular.