Project Period: December 2020-November 2023

Funding Source/Donor Organization: Ministry of Science and Technology, China

Executing Agency:  Zhejiang Agriculture and Forestry University

Contact: Lu Mengzhu: lumz@zafu.edu.cn

Brief Introduction:

The total amount and quality of forest resources in China are insufficient, and the issue of wood safety is becoming increasingly prominent, becoming one of the hot issues directly affecting China's economic development. Cultivating high-quality trees and achieving sustainable forestry development is a major national demand. Due to the limitations of various biological characteristics of trees, the improvement of wood properties must utilize modern biotechnology methods in order to break through the current limiting factors in tree breeding. Through basic research on wood formation, the regulatory mechanism of wood quality formation can be revealed, which can improve specific wood properties using modern technology. Tension wood is an effective experimental system for studying the molecular mechanisms of wood formation. Compared with normal growing wood, tension wood in dicotyledonous plants has significantly reduced vessel elements, increased fiber cells, and significantly thickened secondary walls, mainly composed of glial cellulose. The lignin content in the cell walls is extremely low, indicating that the differentiation of cambium cells and the deposition of cell walls during tension wood formation are under different but strictly ordered genetic regulation. At present, there are many studies on tension wood, but most of them focus on detecting gene expression alteration and constructing regulatory networks underlying tension wood formation. The mechanism by which tension wood related gene expression is caused and the formation of unique woody cell types is still blank. The project aims to use artificially induced tension wood systems in poplar trees, combined with existing genomic resources and molecular and cellular biology technologies, to reveal the molecular mechanisms of tension wood formation, and obtain key wood properties related genes such as xylem cell differentiation and cell wall deposition, laying a foundation for molecular improvement of tree properties.