Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Poplar grow throughout the West coast & are adapted to extremely variable conditions. To examine what allows for this wide range of growth conditions, Jerry Tuskan's team has collected 1000 different individuals from British Columbia to California. In 2009, three Common Gardens were established where each individual was cloned in triplicate. Nearly all of these trees have been sequenced using short read technology, revealing a huge degree of variation in genotype. Correlating this genomic variation to phenotype would be greatly be strengthened if the variants could be phased into long haplotype blocks.