Mammals, and most animals and plants, have two sets of chromosomes in every cell, one from their mum and one from their dad. A few types of birds and some insects, reptiles, amphibians, and fish also can be found with ‘polyploidy’ or several sets – but it is relatively rare and fraught with difficulty for species that reproduce sexually.

It is, however, more common for plants to have more than two sets of chromosomes, perhaps because their structure does not need to be so carefully regulated, and often in the specimens in which additional sets have randomly occurred this ‘genome duplication’ seems to make grow more prolifically and that’s great if you are gathering the crop for food.

And the strawberry is, unusually, an octoploid: as the octopus has eight legs, the strawberry has eight sets of chromosomes in every cell – and that’s so much DNA (in full, that’s…