• Premise of the Study: Tropical liana abundance has been increasing over the past 40 yr, which has been associated with reduced
rainfall. The proposed mechanism allowing lianas to thrive in dry conditions is deeper root systems than co-occurring trees,
although we know very little about the fundamental hydraulic physiology...
Biodiversity loss is of global concern, and is due in part to deforestation and high consumer demand for wood and wood products. The neotropical tree species Cedrela odorata (“Spanish cedar” or “cedro”) is economically valuable for its wood and faces threats of overexploitation. Due to strong similarities in wood features...
To detect and avoid illegal logging of valuable tree species, identification methods for the origin of timber are necessary. We used next-generation sequencing to identify chloroplast genome regions that differentiate the origin of white oaks from the three continents; Asia, Europe, and North America. By using the chloroplast genome of...
The cultivated strawberry, Fragaria Xananassa, is one of the youngest domesticated plants. Its 18th century origin via hybridization in Europe between the North American F. virginiana and the South American F. chiloensis was documented by the botanist Antoine Nicolas Duchesne. His 1766 “Natural History of Strawberries” is an extraordinary work...
Whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis) inhabits an expansive range in western North America, and it is a keystone species of subalpine environments. Whitebark is susceptible to multiple threats – climate change, white pine blister rust, mountain pine beetle, and fire exclusion – and it is suffering significant mortality range-wide, prompting the...
Premise of the study: Triassic and Jurassic fossils record structural changes in conifer seed cones through time, provide the earliest evidence for crown-group conifer clades, and further clarify sister-group relationships of modern conifer families. A new and distinct seed-cone from the Isle of Skye in western Scotland provides the oldest...
Key message Leyland cypress, an intergeneric hybrid, produces the same volatile heartwood compounds as its parental taxa, yellow-cedar and Monterrey cypress. However, the proportion of total sesquiterpenes and some of the individual components appear unique to their respective heartwoods.
Context Leyland cypress, xHesperotropsis leylandii is an intergeneric hybrid between yellow-cedar,...
Cenococcum is a genus of ectomycorrhizal Ascomycota that has a broad host range and geographic distribution. It is not known to produce either meiotic or mitotic spores and is known to exist only in the form of hyphae, sclerotia and host-colonized ectomycorrhizal root tips. Due to its lack of sexual...
Delimiting species boundaries among closely related lineages often requires a range of independent data sets and analytical approaches. Similar to other organismal groups, robust species circumscriptions in fungi are increasingly investigated within an empirical framework. Here we attempt to delimit species boundaries in a closely related Glade of lichen-forming fungi...
PREMISE OF THE STUDY: We report the de novo assembly and characterization of the transcriptomes of Brachypodium sylvaticum
(slender false-brome) accessions from native populations of Spain and Greece, and an invasive population west of Corvallis,
Oregon, USA.
METHODS AND RESULTS: More than 350 million sequence reads from the mRNA libraries...