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
- Modeling climate change effects on the height growth of loblolly pine (2015)
- Decoding the massive genome of loblolly pine using haploid DNA and novel assembly strategies (2014)
- Genetics of stem forking and ramicorn branches in a cloned loblolly pine family (2014)
- Genetic analysis of diallel progeny test data using factor analytic linear mixed models (2014)
- Potential for evolutionary responses to climate change evidence from tree populations (2013)
- SNP markers trace familial linkages in a cloned population of Pinus taeda - prospects for genomic selection (2012)
- Interactions of Fr genes and mixed-pathogen inocula in the loblolly pine-fusiform rust pathosystem (2012)
- Comparison between tracheary element lignin formation and extracellular lignin-like substance formation during the culture of isolated Zinnia elegans mesophyll cells (2011)
- Genetic variation of stem forking in loblolly pine (2010)
- Research gap analysis for application of biotechnology to sustaining US forests (2010)