Ross Whetten
Professor
Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources
Jordan Hall Addition 5231
Area(s) of Expertise
Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Research website
https://research.cnr.ncsu.edu/sites/moleculartreebreeding/
Education
B.S., Arizona State University (1981)
Ph.D., Vanderbilt University (1988)
Research Interests
Applications of molecular biology methods to solve practical problems in management of natural or planted populations of forest trees, with an emphasis on conifer species native to the southeastern USA. Massively-parallel or “next-generation” DNA sequencing technologies provide new opportunities to detect and analyze genetic variation in forest tree populations, and my research is focused on development and application of both new laboratory methods to generate data and new analytical methods to understand how genetic variation is related to variation in traits of ecological or economic importance.
Courses
FOR 350 – Ethics in Natural Resource Management
FOR 411 – Forest Biology and Genetics
FOR 725 – Advanced Forest Genetics
BIT815 – Analysis of Deep Sequencing Data
Publications
- Ad hoc breeding of a genetically depauperate landrace of noble fir (Abies procera Rehder) using SNP genotyping via high-throughput targeted sequencing (2020)
- Correspondence between Breeding Values of the Same Pinus taeda L. Genotypes from Clonal Trials and Half-Sib Seedling Progeny Trials (2020)
- Population structure, landscape genomics, and genetic signatures of adaptation to exotic disease pressure in Cornus florida L.—Insights from GWAS and GBS data (2020)
- Heritable variation in needle spectral reflectance of Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) peaks in red edge (2018)
- Advances in ecological genomics in forest trees and applications to genetic resources conservation and breeding (2017)
- Correspondence of loblolly pine response for fusiform rust disease from local and wide-ranging tests in the Southern United States (2017)
- Ecological genomics of local adaptation in cornus florida l. By genotyping by sequencing (2017)
- Optimal seed deployment under climate change using spatial models: Application to loblolly pine in the Southeastern US (2017)
- Response of Turkish and Trojan fir to Phytophthora cinnamomi and P. cryptogea (2017)
- Variation among Loblolly Pine Seed Sources across Diverse Environments in the Southeastern United States (2017)