BioSurveillance of Alien Forest Enemies  ~ BioSAFE ~ Dr. Richard Hamelin
The world’s forests face unprecedented threats from invasive insects and pathogens that can cause large irreversible damage to the ecosystems. This threatens Canada’s capacity to provide long-term fibre supply and ecosystem services that range from carbon storage, nutrient cycling, water and air purification, soil preservation and maintenance of wildlife habitat. The key to reduce this threat is via vigilant biosurveillance to increase preparedness and facilitate early interventions. But we face a number of challenges. Pests and pathogens are extremely diverse and are disseminated at different life stages, making rapid and accurate identification very difficult. They also enter Canada via a variety of pathways, creating uncertainty about their origin and likely pathways of introduction, thereby complicating decision-making regarding mitigation and management. The BioSAFE (BioSurveillance of Forest Alien Enemies) project is developing a pipeline to generate genomic tools that will provide accurate identification of pests and pathogens, assign outbreak or survey samples to putative sources to identify pathways of spread and assess risk based on traits that impact the outbreak outcome. These next generation biosurveillance tools will help prevent and contain future forest pest and disease outbreaks.

Terpene fragrance biosynthesis in tropical sandalwood - Dr. Joerg Bohlmann
Tropical sandalwood (Santalum album) produces one of the world’s most highly prized fragrances.  The fragrant sandalwood oil is extracted from the heartwood of mature trees. Historical overexploitation has threatened many natural populations of this slow growing, hemiparasitic plant.  Two alternative systems to produce sandalwood fragrance include improved sandalwood plantation forestry and metabolically engineered, heterologous microbial or plant hosts.  The development and optimization of both of these systems will benefit from genomics informed knowledge of sandalwood oil biosynthesis.  Sandalwood oil contains four major fragrance-defining compounds, the sesquiterpene alcohols (Z)-α-santalol, (Z)-β-santalol, (Z)-epi-β-santalol and (Z)-α-exo-bergamotol. The first committed step in their biosynthesis is catalysed by a multiproduct terpene synthase, santalene/bergamotene synthase, which produces α-santalene, β-santalene, epi-β-santalene and α-exo-bergamotene. Formation of the corresponding sesquiterpene alcohols involves stereo-selective cytochrome P450 (P450) enzymes. Metabolite profiling and transcriptome analysis of plantation trees revealed a spatially unique heartwood transcriptome signature for sandalwood fragrance biosynthesis. In this project, we discovered the entire set of biosynthetic genes and enzymes of key components of sandalwood fragrance, which enabled alternative production systems for sandalwood oil fragrances.

The Natural Resources & Environmental Studies Institute (NRESi) at UNBC hosts a weekly lecture series at the Prince George campus. Anyone from the university or wider community with interest in the topic area is welcome to attend. Presentations are also made available to remote participants through Livestream and Blue Jeans. Go to http://www.unbc.ca/nres-institute/colloquium-webcasts to view the presentation remotely.

Past NRESi colloquium presentations and special lectures can be viewed on our video archive, available here.