Butternuts are soft and oily, with a light walnut flavor that lingers on the tongue. But few Americans have tasted this endangered native. Now, UConn undergraduates have published the first full map of the unusual tree's DNA in G3 . It has been accepted for publication by Oxford University Press.
zigzag coral, and the red-vented cockatoo are a few of the other organisms whose genes are getting thoroughly sequenced by the Biodiversity and Conservation Genomics team at UConn's Institute for Systems Genomics. The program provides undergraduates with a full year of training in how to sequence, reconstruct, and describe the full genetic code of a single species.
Pumpkin ash is one of the 16 species of North American ash being killed off by emerald ash borer insects. The red-vented cockatoo is critically endangered by habitat loss and poaching for pets. Andare threatened by the acidification of the oceans, which threatens their ability to create their skeletons of calcium carbonate.
Other organisms might have other secrets. Fungal diseases spread by the horticultural trade are rapidly killing off trees in the great forests of Asia, Europe and the Americas. Sequencing the genomes of related species that evolved with different diseases–such as the butternut and the Japanese walnut—could give valuable insights into which genes provide which type of resistance. It might enable us to save species by replacing a single gene.
"It's…maybe…octaploid!" says Emily Strickland '24 . She started work on the pumpkin ash as an independent research project, found it rather more complex than anyone expected, and is now working on it as part of the Biodiversity and Conservation Genomics team. The 11 undergraduates on the project are primarily MCB and biology majors. For many of them, this is their first research experience. And several of them chose it because of its practical impact.
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