THE tree was a black cottonwood and it grew by the banks of the Nisqually river in Washington State. The tree is gone now, swept away by the shifting river, but not before Gerald Tuskan of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and his team made history last year by sequencing its genome – a first for any tree species.
While the feat may seem like an odd achievement for a lab that was originally created for the Manhattan Project – the American-led effort to develop an atom bomb – it is somehow fitting. Like the bomb, the tree is meant…
