Plant & Animal Genomes XI Conference

January 11-15, 2003
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

Poster: Functional Analysis
            

COLDTREE: UNRAVELING MOLECULAR EVENTS UNDERLYING DORMANCY AND COLD HARDINESS IN FOREST TREE SEEDLINGS.

¹ Agrotechnological Research Institute, PO-box 17, 6700 AA Wageningen, The Netherlands

² Danish Institute for Agricultural Sciences, Kirstinebjergvej 10, DK-5792 Aarslev, Denmark

³ Plant Research International, PO-box 16, 6700 AA Wageningen, The Netherlands.

⁴ Forestry Commision Northern Research Station, EH25 9SY Roslin, Midlothian, United Kingdom

⁵ Dalarna University, Herrgårdsvägen 122, 776 98 Garpenberg, Sweden

The EC-funded COLDTREE project, aims at unraveling the molecular mechanisms involved in winter hardening in woody plants as a first step towards the development of tools for rapid and reliable determination of the physiological condition of forest tree seedlings. Not much is known on the molecular nature of the intertwined processes of dormancy and hardiness in woody species. Unraveling the gene expression pattern as a seedling (grown in the field or in controlled environments) acquires the hardened state will increase this knowledge and will reveal key processes that can be used as landmarks to describe the physiological condition of the tree. Eventually, this will result in molecular tests that facilitate forestation logistics. We employ cDNA micro-array based transcriptional profiling to detect transcripts characteristic for the dormant or active phase in Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris) and common beech (Fagus sylvatica). These two economically important forest trees were chosen as model species for coniferous and deciduous European trees. A dedicated array based on pine bud tissue and carrying 1500 cDNA fragments related to cold tolerance, stress or dormancy, and a number of control genes to allow data normalisation, has been constructed. Test hybridisations showed that the array delivers clearly distinguishable gene expression patterns representing the extremes from the physiological spectrum that will be analysed in the COLDTREE program. The array will be challenged with series of physiologically well-defined samples, spanning the whole period of dormancy and cold hardiness development In a later phase a beech microarray will be produced and challenged.