DECODING A GIANT GENOME

How do redwood trees live so long?  It’s the million dollar question that scientists like Zane Moore hope to answer by looking deeply into the trees’ DNA, and understanding how genetic adaptations enable the trees to survive for hundreds and even thousands of years.  Decoding the the redwood genome could shed light on how to better restore these forests, and provide insights into longevity in ALL living beings.  It’s an ambitious quest undertaken by researchers  from Save the Redwoods League, University of California - Davis, and  Johns Hopkins University, among others.

“We would have to do something once thought impossible: map the redwood genome.”

–ZANE MOORE
Redwood Geneticist, UC Davis

FROM THE VIDEO

[Zane Moore] In order to understand all the Redwood's unique adaptations, we need to look at the genetic code of that redwood tree. To do this, we would have to do something that we once thought impossible. Map the redwood genome. The redwood genome has been ridiculously hard to try and sequence because it's about 10 times larger than the human genome and it has multiple copies of genes, which is really tricky. It would be like if you got three human beings to spit in a tube, sent it off to 23 and me and told them, “hey, you figure out who's who in this tube.”

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