Ross Whetten
Professor
Biltmore Hall (Robertson Wing) 1019B
Bio
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
Area(s) of Expertise
Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Publications
- A genome-wide SNP genotyping resource for tropical pine tree species , MOLECULAR ECOLOGY RESOURCES (2021)
- Breeding for Climate Change Resilience: A Case Study of Loblolly Pine (Pinus taeda L.) in North America , FRONTIERS IN PLANT SCIENCE (2021)
- Provenance and Family Variation in Biomass Potential of Loblolly Pine in the Piedmont of North Carolina , FOREST SCIENCE (2021)
- Toward genomic selection in Pinus taeda: Integrating resources to support array design in a complex conifer genome , APPLICATIONS IN PLANT SCIENCES (2021)
- A fast, flexible and inexpensive protocol for DNA and RNA extraction for forest trees , FOREST SYSTEMS (2020)
- Ad hoc breeding of a genetically depauperate landrace of noble fir (Abies procera Rehder) using SNP genotyping via high-throughput targeted sequencing , Tree Genetics & Genomes (2020)
- Correspondence between Breeding Values of the Same Pinus taeda L. Genotypes from Clonal Trials and Half-Sib Seedling Progeny Trials , Forest Science (2020)
- Population structure, landscape genomics, and genetic signatures of adaptation to exotic disease pressure in Cornus florida L.—Insights from GWAS and GBS data , Journal of Systematics and Evolution (2020)
- Heritable variation in needle spectral reflectance of Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) peaks in red edge , Remote Sensing of Environment (2018)
- Advances in ecological genomics in forest trees and applications to genetic resources conservation and breeding , Molecular Ecology (2017)