Grants

The Genetics of Pine

George CasellaThe symbol of life in the dead of winter, the evergreen, is used for more than just holiday decorations. In fact, the loblolly pine is the most widely cultivated timber species in the Southeast, accounting for more than half of the nation’s total wood production. Statistics Professor and Chair George Casella, along with IFAS colleagues, is working to decode the loblolly pine genome in hopes of building a better tree.

“The goal is to try to associate phenotypic traits, or traits you can see—such as how the tree grows and its chemical composition—with the genetics, in the ultimate hope of actually manipulating the genetics to have stronger, more disease resistant trees,” Casella says. He and faculty in the UF School of Forest Resources and Conservation—Gary Peter, John Davis, Dudley Huber and Matias Kirst—have received a $6 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Plant Genome Research Program to study loblolly pine genetics.

While the IFAS researchers on the team will be identifying gene sequences and collecting trait information—such as growth rate, wood quality and disease resistance—Casella will use his expertise as a statistician to make meaningful associations between the identified genes and those traits. His work is part of the growing field of statistical genetics, which uses statistical methods to help geneticists organize the vast amount of information found in genetic codes, and relate it to traits in a meaningful way. A university-wide graduate program in genetics was recently approved by the Faculty Senate and is slated to begin training future PhD’s in statistical genetics in the fall of 2006.

“Fundamentally, we have gotten to a point where our technology generates an enormous amount of data, so much that we need help organizing and handling it,” says Kenneth Berns, director of the UF Genetics Institute. “When you are dealing with something like population genetics that has so many variables, you need to have special approaches to process all those variables and their applications. That’s where statistical genetics comes in.”

Casella, Peter, Davis, Kirst and Huber are all members of the Genetics Institute and have worked together on several projects since Casella arrived at UF in 2000. The team holds a weekly discussion group on biological and statistical genetics and genomics for faculty and graduate students in CLAS, IFAS and Medicine. According to Berns, the grant is one of the largest the Genetics Institute has received since its creation in 1998.

The team will be comparing 5,000–10,000 of the 50,000 genes in the loblolly pine for relationships to hundreds of traits—focusing on those that unveil the secrets of the tree’s disease resistance and wood quality. The findings will not only help growers produce a better crop, the researchers say, but also reduce pressure to harvest America’s sensitive forest ecosystems, including old-growth forests.

“It is important for our economy to become more efficient, so we are identifying genetically superior trees that can grow on a smaller footprint of land,” Davis says. “If we can grow more wood on fewer acres, it should take the pressure off of harvesting trees that should not be harvested.”

—Buffy Lockette

Grants through the Division of Sponsored Research

October 2005: $2,777,482

Photo by Jane Dominguez

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