Jason Holliday

@jholliday.bsky.social

Forest tree population genomics at Virginia Tech. Chestnuts and cottonwoods.

Excited to share our new Science paper on American chestnut restoration. >10 years of collaboration with TACF, Hudson Alpha, and a community of scientists, students, and staff. Thousands of GBS and WGS libraries and so many hours of HPC wrangling... www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Genomic approaches to accelerate American chestnut restoration

More than a century after two introduced pathogens killed billions of American chestnut trees, introgression of resistance alleles from Chinese chestnuts has contributed to the recovery of self-sustai...

science.org

Maybe we should have an analog to the bar association but for academic science. Changing 12 alleles and earnestly claiming you’ve resurrected an extinct species would surely be grounds for disbarment.

Our paper on the past, present, and genomics-enabled future of American chestnut (Castanea dentata) tree breeding for resistance to invasive pathogens is on BioRxiv. 🧵with some background and a few things we found 👇 bsky.app/profile/bior...

bioRxiv Genomics@biorxiv-genomic.bsky.social · 2y ago

Improving American chestnut resistance to two invasive pathogens through genome-enabled breeding https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.01.30.635736v1

First major paper from the lab! The work was led by super talented postdoc Maria Akopyan. She explored how reference bias skews estimates of diversity, demography, divergence & recombination rate with help from @elliecat.bsky.social & awesome ungrad Matthew. Full thread coming soon 🤓

bioRxiv Evolutionary Biology@biorxiv-evobio.bsky.social · 2y ago

Divergent reference genomes compromise the reconstruction of demographic histories, selection scans, and population genetic summary statistics https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.26.625554v1

New preprint up! We sequenced hundreds of samples from across one of Earth's oldest living organisms - the Pando aspen clone - to understand how mutations accumulate and spread in long-lived clonal organisms. Our results were…surprising. 1/30

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