Pine tree genetics and needle fungi linked to disease resistance
Climate Adaptation
If you've noticed browning, thinning pine needles on trees in your area, this research is part of the effort to figure out why some pines fight off that damage and others don't.
Researchers sampled needles from 200 Scots pine trees growing side by side in a Scottish field trial, some naturally resistant to a fungal disease called Dothistroma needle blight and some highly susceptible. They collected two types of data: a census of all the fungi living on each tree's needles, and a readout of which genes each tree was turning on. Sharing this raw dataset publicly lets other scientists dig into why some pine genotypes resist the disease while others get sick.
Key Findings
Dataset spans 200 pine genotypes sampled across three timepoints for fungal community metabarcoding (ITS2)
Includes RNA sequencing (transcriptome) data from 48 genotypes at two timepoints capturing host gene activity during disease exposure
All raw data deposited publicly in the European Nucleotide Archive under project accession PRJEB88228
chevron_right Technical Summary
Scientists collected genetic data from 200 Scots pine trees to figure out how the fungi living on pine needles relate to a serious pine disease, creating a public dataset researchers can mine to breed more disease-resistant trees.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Metabarcode and transcriptome datasets of Pinus sylvestris to assess fungal phyllosphere and disease dynamics
Abstract Understanding how host–microbiome interactions influence tree disease is critical for understanding forest resilience. Here, we present foliar microbiome ITS2 metabarcoding transcriptomic ...
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
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Pinus sylvestris is a species of tree in the pine family Pinaceae that is native to Eurasia. It is commonly known as the Scots pine in English; it is also known as the Scotch pine in the United States, and occasionally called the Baltic pine or European red pine. It can readily be identified by i...