Professor David Neale showed in preliminary research that it is feasible to sequence the coast redwood, a complex hexaploid plant (with six sets of chromosomes, compared to humans' two sets). The redwood has a genome 10 times larger than that of humans.
Plant scientists and wheat breeders now have a new tool to develop more nutritious and productive wheat varieties: A public online database of 10 million mutations in wheat genes. Scientists at UC Davis and three institutions in the UK created the database, which will allow scientists worldwide to study the function of every gene of wheat.
Is adaptation to cold environments regulated by a few genes, thousands of genes, or a specific set (or different sets) of genes each time? Ross-Ibarra and colleagues are trying to answer these questions.
Sometimes, the evolutionary history of a species can be found in a fossil record. Other times, DNA and genetic fingerprints replace rocks and imprints. That is the case for the carrot, the richest crop source of vitamin A in the American diet, whose full genetic code has been deciphered by a team led by the University of Wisconsin-Madison in collaboration with the University of California, Davis.
The genome of California's legendary sugar pine, which naturalist John Muir declared to be "king of the conifers" more than a century ago, has been sequenced by a research team led by UC Davis scientists.
Scientists at the University of California, Davis, have for the first time sequenced the genome of a commercial walnut variety. The information should accelerate the rate of breeding and variety improvement in walnuts and help breeders select for desired traits such as insect and disease resistance, and drought tolerance.
