Genomic Resources for North American Hardwoods

Increasing pressures on forests and tree plantings due to climate change and invasive insects and microbes require accelerated tree improvement, stand management, and reforestation efforts. To this end the Hardwood Genomics Project over the last four years has generated genetic and genomic resources across a broad taxonomic distribution of hardwood tree species, including black walnut (BW, Juglans nigra), blackgum (BG, Nyssa sylvatica), green ash (GA, Fraxinus pennsylvanica), honeylocust (HL, Gleditsia triacanthos), northern red oak (NRO, Quercus rubra), sugar maple (SM, Acer saccharum), sweetgum (SG, Liquidambar styraciflua), and yellow poplar (YP, Liriodendron tulipifera). Resources available or in progress from the project include: Deep transcriptomes and Differential gene expression information from multiple tissues and abiotic stress conditions of increased ozone, drought, heat, cold and wounding; Genomic- and EST-SSR discovery and verification; Full sibling mapping populations and genetic linkage maps (BW, GA, HL, NRO, YP); Phenotyping and QTL mapping (BW, NRO); Bacterial artificial clone (BAC) libraries; Sequences from 200 BAC clones containing candidate genes related to dormancy, stress or flowering (BW, NRO); and a Genome database and project website at hardwoodgenomics.org. Descriptions of these datasets will be presented. All data are publicly available online through the project website and NCBI. This project is supported by grant # TRPGR IOS-1025974 from the National Science Foundation’s Plant Genome Research Program.