<p>This question was inspired by Peter Cock 's tweet</p>

https://twitter.com/pjacock/status/118012750105546752

<p>Most softwares (C, java...) use a int32 (unsigned or not) to store the length of the chromosome. It isn't enough when the length of a chromosome is greater than INT_MAX or UINT_MAX</p>

<pre><code>#  define INT_MAX    2147483647
#  define UINT_MAX    4294967295U
</code></pre>

<p>So my question is:</p>

<ul>
<li>Is there any resource where one can find the length of the chromosomes. Something like <a href='http://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/'>BioNumbers</a>.</li>
<li>What's the length of the longest chromosome ? </li>
</ul>

[This old poster][1] gives highest genome size of 130 billion base pairs for lungfish

Biochemical measurements [suggest that certain Amoeba might have larger genomes][2]

Also see references for [this article][3] and [this one][4].

(note that these are genome sizes not chromosome sizes but large genome size and low chromosome count might mean chromosomes are large assuming most of genome isn't mitochondrial DNA or something)

 [1]: http://www.sciencemag.org/site/products/posters/SequencingPoster.pdf
 [2]: http://www.genomesize.com/statistics.php
 [3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome_size#Conversion_from_picograms_.28pg.29_to_base_pairs_.28bp.29
 [4]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome#Genome_size