Abstract:

Abstract: As important renewable natural resources, forest trees have a huge economic, ecological and social value. Genetic improvement programs play a crucial role in the sustainable management of forest resources. The rapid development of modern molecular biotechnology brings us new opportunities and challenges in forest tree improvement. Forest biotechnology has already shown great application potential for forest tree improvement. Not only has the potential been demonstrated in producing transgenic trees with optimized yield and quality traits in field trials, but progress in genetical genomics and association genetics provide new thoughts for tree improvement. The availability of Populus genome sequence will develop new domain in the tree molecular breeding. In this paper, we reviewed molecular biology applied in the improvement process of forest tree, together with two main avenues, genetical genomics and association genetics, to accelerate forest tree improvement. Moreover, the existing problems and the perspective of applications of molecular biotechnology to tree genetic improvement were also discussed.

Key words: Key words: forest tree improvement, genetical genomics, association genetics