why do strawberries have more chromosomes than humans?
Shawn Burgess, Ph.D.: My research area involves studying developmental processes and their relation to human genetic disease. The official number of chromosomes for strawberries is actually 7 (compared to humans who have 23). Normally strawberries would have 14 chromosomes (2n), however in order to make larger berries, breeders have made strawberry plants that have 8 duplicate copies of the genome (8n known as octaploids). So strawberries have lots and lots of DNA per cell.