question about pine seedlings

[john doe]

On Tue, 18 Aug 1998 08:59:34 -0700, Mike Hagen <mhagen at olympus.net>
wrote:

>I can add a bit about cloning.  It's been done with redwoods.  As I
>understand the process, there's nothing very mumbo-jumbo about it, just
>controlled vegetative reproduction.

There is a lot of very sophisticated 'mumbo-jumbo' going on outside of
the realm of vegetative reproduction. A LOT of money has been sunk
into biotech by industry, including forest product companies.

There is advanced cloning research and production work being performed
on pine, including loblolly.

>There's no genetic tinkering involved other than plain selective
>breeding and Farmers have been doing that for a while now.

There is a lot of work being done with inserting foreign genes, as
well as control of existing genes to improve fiber properties, and
yield. And, of course, sexual sterility of transformed plants to
prevent flow of transformed genes into wild populations.

Recently there was a tree improvement conference, where some of these
topics were addressed. For an idea of the topics discussed, you may
want to check out the following:

http://www.ipst.edu/treeconf/