![]() The research involves collecting sugar pine seeds from blister rust-resilient trees and infecting them with the fungus. Fortunately, the sugar pine genome was sequenced in 2016.” “It will take a lot of effort because we are talking about this huge genome. Through an $810,000 four-year grant from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), De La Torre is working in partnership with assistant research professor of ecology and evolutionary biology Jill Wegrzyn at the University of Connecticut (UConn) to create a methylated map for the species. The sequence, or bioinformatic computation, wasn’t good enough to deal with this amount of data in the past.” “The reason this has not been studied before is because the sugar pine has a huge genome, several times larger than humans and probably one of the largest in plant species. That’s why De La Torre is looking across the whole sugar pine genome for methylated sites – altered areas on the DNA – that are translated through the RNA and expressed through the plant’s reaction to the fungus. It’s not really in the genetic makeup of the seedling, but is expressed by how the next generation of trees react to the disease,” she said. “Maybe it got too hot or too cold unexpectedly, so those seeds may have inherited this experience of the mom. We know very little about this in trees.”ĭe La Torre explains that epigenomic changes can be caused by something that the mother experienced, like a change in the environment that stressed the tree. “We also know from studies on other plant species that sometimes there are effects a mother can pass on that are not in the genes, epigenomic changes. They may get those genes that allow them to survive if they are attacked by the fungus,” De La Torre said. “Trees can inherit the resistance through genes. Assistant professor of forest genetics Amanda De La Torre, in the School of Forestry at Northern Arizona University, is delving deep into the genome of sugar pines – a white pine species – to find out why. Forest Service (USFS) reports about three to five percent of white pines are resistant to the devastating effects of the pathogen however, that doesn’t mean their offspring will be immune to the disease as well. The fungus, Cronartium ribicola, attacks five-needle pines and kills more than 95 percent of the trees it infects by cutting off pathways for water and nutrients in the cambium layer, where new growth occurs. For about 100 years, a deadly disease called white pine blister rust has been spreading steadily from Canada across western forests of the United States and along the East Coast.
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