Today’s guest post was contributed by Allessandra DiCorato, a freelance science writer based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Read more of her work at allessandradicorato.com.

The sacred fir tree grows at high elevations along the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt, an arc of volcanoes that stretch across central-southern Mexico. Sacred fir forests help sequester carbon, stabilize the soil, capture and filter water, and are the preferred winter habitat of monarch butterflies.

But near Mexico City, these trees are threatened by exposure to high levels of ozone, generated in the city by burning fossil fuels and spread outwards by winds through mountain passes. An estimated 35% of the fir trees surrounding Mexico City show symptoms of ozone damage, including reddish needles that fall off years early and an increased susceptibility to pests. 

Now, new research in G3: Genes|Genomes|Genetics lays a foundation for understanding how trees cope with this source of stress.

Researchers from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens in the UK have developed a linkage map for the sacred fir tree. This kind of map describes how frequently genes are inherited together, which is useful for understanding particularly large and repetitive genomes like a conifer’s. The map—generated by sequencing DNA from the seeds of two trees in different regions outside Mexico City—features 5,881 coding genes, about 2,000 of which had known functions in conifers.

Armed with this map, the researchers returned to gene expression data they’d previously collected from a forest west of Mexico City where there is chronic air pollution and both healthy and ozone-damaged trees can be found. Among the genes in the linkage map, they identified three clusters of genes with highly correlated expression and eight genes that were expressed significantly differently by healthy and damaged trees, including genes known to play a role in how other plants respond to ozone exposure. 

Clustered genes also encoded proteins with similar functions. This is consistent with a previous theory suggesting that genes that are part of the same metabolic pathway or response are located near each other, allowing for organisms to regulate genes together and react quickly to threats such as pathogens. Focusing on these groups of genes in the sacred fir could help scientists identify trees that are more ozone-tolerant for reforestation efforts in regions with high levels of ozone pollution.

More broadly, the researchers say the approach highlights the potential of integrating evolutionary genomics and RNA sequencing to shed light on how forest trees respond to sudden environmental threats and could be extended to study drought or soil pollution in other conifers. 

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