Red Wood Cloning May Help Forest Management

Red wood trees are well known for their incredible size and impressive longevity, but very few

people realize there’s more to the great trees than their size. Red Wood trees are often examined in biology for their cloning tendencies, as they are prone to sprouting entirely new trees from roots, cut branches, and fallen stumps of grown trees. Not much research has looked at the lineages created by these cloning trees, but a recent study at UC Berkley has pioneered this kind of study. Because Red Woods are hexaploid – that’s right, not one or two but six sets of chromosomes in the genome – their lineages are difficult to trace, especially with the chance of mutation taken into account. In the UC Berkley study, DNA was extracted from 770 redwoods and 449 distinct clones were identified. Because redwoods are prized both for their natural preservation and their youthful lumber, understanding the genetics of redwoods could help create healthy forest management options for redwood lumber as well as help in the current actions beign taken to preserve currently growing redwood areas. The head researcher of this study hopes that clonal studies could expand beyond redwoods to other cloning species, as well as help scientists understand the physical structure of forests.

DNA Sequences Reveal Insight on Redwoods

     Coast redwoods are the tallest trees in the world.  However, they also have another magnificent trait, they can sprout from fallen logs, roots and even sprouting from cut stumps.  Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley are uncovering information about patterns of coast redwood clones with a new DNA analysis method. This new method could help forest management and preservation efforts.  The new method will let scientists identify clonal lineages and study how clonal diversity varies throughout the range of species.  Coast redwoods are among the oldest living trees on earth and very little research has been done with the clonal patterns of the coast redwoods.  This is somewhat due to the fact that they are hexaploid, or they have six copies of each homologous chromosome instead of two.
     Lakshmi Narayan, the grad student who is leading the UC Berkeley study says that in addition to the hexaploid condition they also have another challenge that the genotypic identity of clonal plants could possibly cause somatic mutations.  Narayan has designed a new protocol to overcome challenges associated with mutations and the high genetic copy number in the redwood DNA.  Narayan and her team collected DNA from 770 redwoods and have identified about 449 distinct clones.  The key to this new method is the use of short repeating DNA sequences.  The short DNA sequences, known as microsatellites, are present in all living organisms and widely used to distinguish individuals from one another.
     Hopefully this new method will shed light on other species which are still under investigation.  The new method of studying the short DNA sequences might give researchers a better understanding of the redwoods which are such old plants.  We could potentially study how they live so long giving us a better understanding on preserving other species.

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