Why do I care about genes, adaptation and poplar trees? What makes me excited about this research topic? Read on my friend and find out (and maybe you will care too 🙂 ).
My species of interest is black cottonwood (Populus trichocarpa), an ecologically and economically important forest tree from North America, and the first tree species to have its genome sequenced! But what is the big deal with these genomes anyways? Genomes are the genetic material of an organism (ie all the DNA and genes). You may have heard about the human genome, but we also have genomes available for many other species (eg. mice, yeast and Arabidopsis –the guinea pig in the plant research world ) including black cottonwood (want a complete list? Here you’ll find genomes from plant species).
Many tools have been developed for human genome analysis so that we can identify genes related to adaptation. For example, genome data is used in humans to find genetic markers related to diseases such as cancer. Today, there are a number of companies that will take your blood sample and test if you have certain alleles (gene copies) commonly found in people with specific types of cancers. Â
But trees are interesting as well! Using a similar approach we could screen the genomes of many trees and look for genes related to growth (to select trees that grow faster), disease resistance (to find trees that will remain healthy in the face of pest outbreaks) and adaptation to climate change (to breed genes that will be resilient to changes in climate). Black cottonwood is a great model since this tree is found from Alaska, where winters are long, to southern California, where…do they even have winter down there? This gives me a lot of environmental variation and enables me to test why trees from the north like it (and survive) up there, while trees from the south are resilient to insect and fungal pests not found in the north.  Â
In my next post I’ll talk about the logistics of this research process and how diverse my work can be (from cleaning seeds to analysing genomic data on my computer).
Photo credits: [thumbnail] Flickr user Charles Knowles.
[banner] Flickr user Carlos Solana.