In which type of organism do the smallest genomes occur?
The genome size, and the number of genes it encodes varies widely between organisms. The smallest genomes occur in viruses (which can have as few as 2 protein-coding genes), and viroids (which act as a single non-coding RNA gene). Conversely, plants can have extremely large genomes, with rice containing >46,000 protein-coding genes. The total number of protein-coding genes (the Earth's proteome) is estimated to be 5 million sequences.