Native trees adapt to the climate and environmental conditions of their region to survive. Researchers from the College of Natural Resources and Environment, supported by the American Chestnut Foundation, confirmed this by examining the genomes of American chestnut trees sampled within the Appalachian Mountain Range and grouping the samples in response to their specific ecological region.
Research recently published within the journal has the potential to assist the inspiration restore American chestnut populations and adjust breeding to a changing climate.
“To understand historical spatial adaptations to climate, we sequenced the genomes of many wild chestnut seedlings and identified relationships between the genomes of these different sites and the environments of those sites,” said Jason Holliday, Professor of Department of Forest Resources and Environment said. Protection
What the team found, not surprisingly, was an ideal deal of genetic adaptation amongst chestnut trees to different environments, in response to Holliday. Then, team members divided the Appalachian region into three regions based on similar adaptations of native trees — one group within the north, one in the middle, and a 3rd within the south.
A fungal blight devastated the American chestnut tree within the early twentieth century, killing billions of trees and changing the life cycle of species living within the Appalachian Mountains. Because of chronic fungal blight infection, the species is unable to breed, migrate, or evolve in response to climate change. The American Chestnut Foundation has spent the past 40 years making a genetically modified, blight-resistant species, but until now no attention has been paid to an adapted variety.
“The American Chestnut Foundation's breeding program used pollen from different places within the range, so one query is whether or not they have captured the adaptive diversity that exists within the wild American chestnut range in such a way that they’re can develop families which might be suitable for specific planting sites,” Holliday said.
Using deep learning software, the researchers were capable of predict the geographic origin of a selected genome sequence by training the model using trees with known origins. The results showed that the inspiration is doing well to provide trees with adaptive diversity, although care should be taken to withstand further breeding to avoid damaging this diversity.
Going forward, this information, along with providing guidance for maximizing the gathering and preservation of this diversity from the three regions established by the study, will allow the Foundation to align regions with the very best match to their genomes. , may help restore certain blight-resistant American chestnut families.
Alex Sandercock, the paper's lead creator, was a doctoral student within the Genetics, Bioinformatics, and Computational Biology program throughout the study and a graduate fellow on the Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Sciences.
Jared Westbrook, co-author of the paper and director of science for the American Chestnut Foundation, said Sandercock's work has developed potential targets for the way many American chestnut trees must be shielded from each of the three regional populations.
“We learned that the American Chestnut Foundation has more work to do to protect the South American population of trees, which is especially important to protect because it is genetically diverse and best adapted to future warmer climates. It's likely,” Westbrook said.
Funding for this research was provided partly by the Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Sciences at Virginia Tech and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture.