Professor Zander Myburg
Wood from fast-growing Eucalyptus (commonly known as ‘gum’) tree plantations is a renewable feedstock for bioproducts such as timber, cellulose, paper, textiles, food additives, pharmaceuticals and various forms of bioenergy. These are renewable alternatives for petroleum-based products and constitute one of the cornerstones of the global bioeconomy.
In a major study funded by the US Department of Energy, researchers from the University of Pretoria, together with an international consortium of scientists from over 30 institutions, decoded the 640 million base-pair genome sequence of the eucalypt species, E. grandis. The main findings of the study were reported in the prestigious journal Nature in 2014*. Following that, the detailed findings on the biology and evolution of Eucalyptus encoded in the genome sequence were published in 2015 in a special issue of the journal New Phytologist.
With support from the lead investigator of the project, Professor Zander Myburg in the Department of Genetics and the Forestry and Agricultural Biotechnology Institute (FABI), emerging young researchers Drs Eshchar Mizrachi and Steven Hussey at UP made major contributions to the companion studies unravelling the eucalypt genome and co-authored several articles in the special issue covering diverse topics such as comparative genomics, carbon allocation, protein evolution and woody biomass production in Eucalyptus trees. This set of papers represents a significant advance in the understanding of the biology of the most widely planted hardwood fibre crop in the world and illustrates the value of supporting young science leaders in frontier research fields at UP.
*Myburg, ZA. et al (2014). The genome of Eucalyptus grandis, Nature, 510, 356-362, doi:10.1038/nature13308
