It is the intention of this article to explain, in detail, why plantation forests are needed to sustainably meet the world's demand for wood, why they are not being developed fast enough, and why the application of biotechnology to tree improvement is essential to speeding up this process.
To achieve this in reasonable time, biotechnology must be applied to the tree-improvement process, for which large increases in public and private capital investment are needed.
Plant materials for lignin content determination and small RNA analysis were taken from 10 years old A. mangium trees in Plot W, Plant Biotechnology Centre, UKM, Bangi, Malaysia.
The presence of such phytochemicals would validate indigenous knowledge held by traditional communities regarding its medicinal value, and position quinine tree as candidate for exploitation using modern biotechnology.
Fruiting bodies of T. camphorata, a fungus that occurs only in the inner cavity of an endangered tree Cinnamonum kanehirai, were obtained from Asian Nova Biotechnology Inc, Taiwan (http://www.asian-bio.com/).
Currently, there are only 37,745 rubber tree ESTs available in the national center for biotechnology information (NCBI) database (as of Dec 2011).
The latest in a rash of attacks on agricultural biotechnology has felled the only genetically modified trees in the United Kingdom.
Propagation by somatic embryogenesis (SE) is the primary technology used for many conifer biotechnology products, including the development of transgenic trees.
Vincent L. Chiang, co-director of the forest biotechnology group at North Carolina State University, has developed transgenic trees with as little as half the lignin of their natural counterparts.
