Researchers have completed the massive project of sequencing the loblolly pine's genome, discovering genetic secrets such as which genes resist disease.
Led by a scientist from the University of California, Davis, the nationwide team tackled the loblolly pine to draft the biggest genome sequence to date, according to a school news release.
The draft genome is around seven times larger than the human genome and is the most complete conifer genome sequence yet published.
"It's a huge genome. But the challenge isn't just collecting all the sequence data. The problem is assembling that sequence into order," study leader David Neale, a professor of plant sciences at UC Davis, said in the news release.
Neale and the team's findings were recently published in the scientific journals GENETICS and Genome Biology.
They worked to sequence the enormous genome with a new tactic: compressing the raw data sequence by 100 times, said the news release.
University of Maryland researchers developed the technique, which involves processing the genetic data to eliminate redundancies before going through it. The method yields 100 times less sequence data, making the genome more manageable.
"We were able to assemble the human genome, but that was close to the limit of our ability; seven times bigger was just too much," Steven Salzberg, professor of medicine and biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University, said in a statement. A study author, Salzberg worked as one of the directors on the loblolly genome assembly team.
The team chose the loblolly pine in particular for its pathogen-resistant traits, which will be useful as scientists work to learn more about diseases among pines.
"The fusiform rust mapping that our scientists did as part of this project provides significant information for land managers, since more than 500 million loblolly pine seedlings with these resistance genes are planted every year," Dana Nelson, the institute's project leader, said in a statement.
"The group selected loblolly pine for sequencing because of the relatively long history of genetic research from the institute and others on the loblolly's complex traits such as disease resistance," he said.
A UC Davis research team headed the project, while Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland led the assembly stages. Project members also came from Indiana University, Bloomington; Texas A&M University; Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute; and Washington State University.
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