Twenty researchers — more than half of them Simon Fraser University
graduates and/or faculty — could become eastern Canada’s knights in shining
white lab coats.
A paper detailing their newly created sequencing of the
mountain pine beetle’s (MPB) genome will be gold in the hands of scientists
trying to stem the beetle’s invasion into eastern forests. The journal Genome
Biology has published the paper.
“We know a lot about how beetle infestations can devastate
forests, just as the mountain pine beetle has been doing to B.C.’s lodgepole
pines,” says Christopher Keeling, the paper’s lead author.