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Will genomics guide a greener forest biotech?

Groover AT

Institute of Forest Genetics, Pacific Southwest Research Station, USDA Forest Service, 1100 West Chiles Road, Davis, CA 95616, USA.

Forest biotechnology has been increasingly associated with wood production using plantation forestry, and has stressed applications that use pedigreed material and transgenic trees. Reasons for this emphasis include limitations of available technologies to conform to underlying genetic features of undomesticated forest tree populations. More recently, genomic technologies have rapidly begun to expand the scope of forest biotechnology. Genomic technologies are well suited to describe and make use of the abundant genetic variation present in undomesticated forest tree populations. Genomics thus enables new research and applications for conservation and management of natural forests, and is a primary technological driver for new research addressing the use of forests trees for carbon sequestration, biofuels feedstocks, and other 'green' applications.

Published 12 June 2007 in Trends Plant Sci, 12(6): 234-8.
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