ABSTRACT
Poplars have recently become the model woody plant for study of secondary cell-wall formation and perennial growth habit. Several Populus species were adopted initially due to the ease of vegetative propagation, transformability, and the availability of saturated genetic maps in several well-established pedigrees (Bradshaw et al. 2000; Taylor 2002). The research interest increased signifi cantly with the availability of the genome sequence of the P. trichocarpa genotype Nisqually-1, released publicly in 2006 (Tuskan et al. 2006). P. trichocarpa was only the third plant species, and the fi rst woody perennial to be sequenced, following the release of the Arabidopsis thaliana genome in 2000, and the rice genome in 2002 (Goff et al. 2002; Yu et al. 2002).
