Abstract:

To meet the strategic demands of high-quality forestry development and to support ecological restoration, timber supply, and carbon sequestration, forest tree genetics and breeding plays a central role in linking germplasm innovation, elite variety cultivation, and industrial application. In recent years, research on forest genetic breeding in China has increasingly focused on frontier fields such as genomics, precision gene editing, and molecular design breeding. Key technologies have continued to break through, and the integration of complementary approaches and the formation of a full chain innovation pattern have accelerated, significantly improving breeding accuracy and efficiency and providing core technological support for forestry modernization. In 2025, a series of significant progress in China has been made in forest tree genomics, regulatory mechanisms of major traits, molecular breeding technologies, and elite variety propagation. This review systematically summarizes major research achievements of China in 2025, covering genome assembly and cross-species genomic analyses, the genetic architecture and regulatory mechanisms of key forest traits, advances in gene editing and genomic selection, and innovations in germplasm resources and efficient propagation technologies. Collectively, these studies not only expand current understanding of forest tree genetics, but also provide methodological and resource support for precision design breeding. Finally, we discuss future development directions, with an emphasis on data-driven breeding, intelligent breeding design, the integration of emerging technologies, and the development of integrated breeding frameworks.

Key words: tree genetics and breeding, genomics, trait regulation, hybrid breeding, gene editing, genomic selection, elite variety propagation