[COLLOQUE] GENTREE Final Conference 27-31 January 2020 séance 25

GENTREE Final Conference : Anna-Maria FARSAKOGLOU - Aristotle University of Thessaloniki · Greece 

GENTREE Final Conference 'Genetics to the rescue - managing forests sustainably in a changing environment'

27-31 January 2020, Avignon, France

http://www.gentree-h2020.eu/

Anna-Maria FARSAKOGLOU - Aristotle University of Thessaloniki · Greece : Genome-wide genetic diversity and differentiation of 12 major European tree species elucidates conservation needs

The prospect of genetic diversity loss under a changing climate callsfor improved conservation strategies.

Recent technological advancesenabled us to estimate with a high analytical power, geneticdiversity and differentiation parameters at the genome-wide level andanswer crucial biological questions related to conservation and tothe fate of populations under strong environmental change.

Herein, wepresent key genetic diversity and genetic differentiation parametersfor 12 ecologically significant and commercially important Europeantree species, as the baseline of a concrete plan of action for theconservation of the European forest genetic resources.Material/Methods: For each species 10 to 25 populations (19 to 25trees per population) were used for Allegro genotyping and exomecapture sequencing, respectively, in order to produce around severalthousands SNPs for each species.

A bioinformatics pipeline wasconstructed, using the R and UNIX environments, in order toautomatically analyze the data and estimate genetic parameters.Results: To assess genetic variation from a conservation perspective,we estimated for all populations of each species, expected (He) andobserved (Ho) heterozygosity, the inbreeding coefficient (FIS), andthe FST(i) as the genetic differentiation of a single populationcompared to all others within a species.

Moreover, we have alsocalculated the Effective Population Size (Ne), and the folded SiteFrequency Spectrum (SFS) with its respective concavity, to infer apossible signal of underlying evolutionary forces.

Conclusion: A set,and overview of conservation genetics parameters is provided for anetwork of natural populations across the species range for some ofthe most important forest trees in Europe.

Τhese parameters will beuseful to highlight population properties, such as high geneticdiversity, or severe genetic bottlenecks and conceive strategiesranging from in situ gene conservation to genetic rescue.

Therefore,these results can serve as a powerful tool for novel approaches inconservation and management.