Trees have the ability to undergo secondary growth and produce a woody body.
We are taking a genomics-based approach to understand the molecular biology of wood formation and the processes by which its extractives are produced and stored. Isolation of high quality mRNAs from the cells inside trunk wood has been difficult for several reasons. These ESTs can also be used as molecular markers in tree genome projects. We are currently working to fabricate the ESTs into DNA arrays and carry out hybridization experiments to obtain gene expression patterns in trunk wood. The results from both the EST analysis and DNA array experiments will be presented.