Congratulations to the 2018 EVOLTREE project grants winners!
We are pleased to announce the winners of the latest EVOLTREE funding round of the second half of 2018.
We congratulate Sonja Kujala (Natural Resources Institute Finland) and Christian Rellstab (WSL) who have been awarded funding (10,000€/each) for some great projects. Both projects strongly contribute to the ongoing EVOLTREE research activities.
Sonja Kujala
Convergent adaptation in northern Pinus sylvestris and Picea abies?-Genotyping the Evoltree ISS Punkaharju
The P. sylvestris genotyping and association analyses of this work will be done with Evoltree Intensive Study site for P. sylvestris, located in Punkaharju, Finland. The funding will be used for genotyping the 500 mother trees of Punkaharju ISS.
Christian Rellstab
OAKID2-Transferability and phylogenetic extension of species-diagnostic SNP markers in European white oak species
The project is a co-operation of the two EVOLTREE partners WSL and INRA Pierroton that have established a fruitful long-term cooperation (e.g., Gerber et al., PLOS ONE, 2014; Rellstab et al., Mol. Ecol.,2016) over the last years. The project investigates a technically and scientifically interesting topic in forest genetics that is of practical and scientific relevance for the research community of EVOLTREE. Specifically, oaks included in the permanent samples from the four ISS Landes, Ventoux, Valais, and Solling will be included in the test array, and results can be compared to nuclear microsatellite markers previously genotyped at WSL (using the 8-plex of Guichoux et al., Mol. Ecol. Resour., 2011). The optimized species diagnostic SNP set, in combination with the freely available assignment pipeline in R, can be used to assign taxa to oak trees from other EVOLTREE ISS populations and TREETYPE individuals. Since species assignment in oaks is often difficult, this will help increasing the quality of the site and tree data in these two EVOLTREE resources. All SNP data will be entered in the EVOLTREE SNP DATABASE. It is intended to store DNAs of all newly collected and genotyped samples in the EVOLTREE Repository Center.
These two grant recipients are just a tiny sample of the incredible work being doing by EVOLTREE members, partners and supporters.
The EVOLTREE network is a European Research Group facilitated by EFI.
More info about this funding initiative
Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash
