Alice was one of our first cohort of interns, working at Forest Research in Scotland on a three month project from January to March. She worked on a ‘horizon scanning’ project, looking at threats to trees from pests and diseases. She learnt lots of new skills, including fieldwork techniques and programming in R. You can read Alice’s diary here:
European Ash – how an improved reference genome can help our research
Dr Daniel Wood, a Centre for Forest Protection Postdoctoral Research Associate is working on our ash pangenome project. A few years ago, Kew Scientists and QMUL produced the first reference genome for the ash tree. Daniel has been working on improving this genome, and the team have recently released this new reference genome for use by scientists. Here, he explains what a reference genome is, how it is used and why we need to update it for our work on ash dieback.
