What is it about?
Essential oils are valuable plant-based commodities, yet beyond their biosynthesis little is known about the genetic basis of yield variation. Here, we examine the genetic basis of essential oil yield from whole genome sequences of 480 individuals of blue mallee, a eucalypt grown for the production of essential oil.
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Why is it important?
Finding the genes that are responsible for the production of individual compounds of eucalyptus oil will allow the selection or engineering of trees with new or different essential oils. This can be used to create new varieties for the production of specialty essential oils and biofuels, including jet fuel.
Perspectives
It took six years to produce this article, with a diverse range of work from field collections in hot windy conditions, to lab work for DNA and essential oil extraction, to a huge genetic data set and millions of hours of analysis on a supercomputer. Getting this all together and published was great.
Carsten Kuelheim
Michigan Technological University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: High marker density
GWAS
provides novel insights into the genomic architecture of terpene oil yield in
Eucalyptus, New Phytologist, May 2019, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/nph.15887.
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