María Rosario García-Gil (left) and Totte Niittylä (right) will use the funding from the Swedish Research Council to study stress resilience and carbon sequestration in trees. Photos: Luna Niemi García (left), Fredrik Larsson (right) María Rosario García-Gil and Totte Niittylä receive funding from the Swedish Research Council to study stress resilience and carbon sequestration in trees. Both researchers are group leaders at UPSC and SLU. Within the last five years, researchers at UPSC have secured a total of seventeen grants from the Swedish Research Council including these two new grants.
The focus of María Rosario García-Gil’s research group is on forest tree genetics and breeding. She and her group are working mainly with the economically important tree species Norway spruce and Scots pine. They are investigating ways to improve traditional tree breeding practices using contemporary gene sequencing techniques and remote sensing tools, but they are also investigating physiological responses associated with tree adaptation to light and shade. In the approved project, she plans to investigate if an enhanced lignin synthesis can confer a better disease resilience in conifers under shade.
“In a previous study, my co-worker Sonali Ranade and I showed that Scots pine and Norway spruce populations from the North react differently to shade than those from the South,” says María Rosario García-Gil. “Usually, lignin synthesis is reduced under shade but in the Northern populations that we studied in comparison to Southern population it was enhanced. In parallel, defence-related genes were activated and we think this is an evolutionary adaptation to the shadier northern conditions. The question is if this adaption also confers a higher resilience against diseases which is what we would like to investigate further in this project.”
To answer this question María Rosario García-Gil and her colleagues plan to exploit multiple technologies including visual techniques like microscopy but also gene and metabolite analyses. Their goal is to gain a comprehensive understanding on how lignin synthesis and tree disease resistance are connected. Climate change is already now affecting tree and forest health due to pest spreading and insect attacks and the researchers think that their results will be valuable for a sustainable management of Norway spruce and Scots pine forests in Scandinavia.
Totte Niittylä’s research project is also connected to climate change and its impacts on forest ecosystems, but he will focus on a different aspect. His group’s expertise is in carbon allocation in trees, especially on how sugars from photosynthesis are used for wood formation. Their favourite tree model organism is hybrid aspen because of its ease of genetic manipulation and excellent genomic resources. Also in the new project, the group will work with hybrid aspen and investigate how trees draw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and how the assimilated carbon is used for wood formation.
“The wood of trees is the single most important terrestrial sink of carbon dioxide. This means that forests are critical in the mitigation of climate change”, says Totte Niittylä. “Despite its importance, the mechanisms controlling carbon sequestration into wood are not well understood. The purpose of our project is to describe the molecular controls of this process. Our vision is that filling this knowledge gap will improve our ability to predict the impact of climate change on forest ecosystems.”
Totte Niittylä and his group plan to investigate how sugars are transported within the tree, how leaves and developing wood communicate to coordinate this process and how sugar metabolism and wood formation are connected. They will use state-of-the-art molecular biology methods to identify proteins that regulate the key metabolic pathways during wood formation and combine these methods with metabolite studies and tools for studying wood and tree phenotypes. Their aim is to contribute parameters on carbon uptake capacity of trees that will help to improve global climate models.
The two projects approved by the Swedish Research Council within Natural and Engineering Sciences:
- Project: To grow or to defend? - Deciphering defense-growth strategies in Scots pine and Norway spruce under local light conditions in Sweden
María Rosario García-Gil
Umeå Plant Science Centre
Department of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Email:
https://www.upsc.se/rosario_garcia
- Project: Molecular control of carbon sequestration into wood
Totte Niittylä
Umeå Plant Science Centre
Department of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Email:
https://www.upsc.se/totte_niittyla