Poster: Late and Moved Abstracts

Abs # 1018: Measuring Pollen Flow in Native Oak Forests by DNA Fingerprinting

Presenter:	Genna, Teresa , gennat@wilkes.edu
Authors	Genna, Teresa  (A)   Hunsinger, James  (A)   Carlson, John E (C)   Layer, Drew W (A)   Marking, Holly  (C)   McEuen, Amy  (A)   Shafqat, Mohammad S (A)   Smallwood, Peter  (B)   Steele, Mike  (A)   Terzaghi, William  (A)
Affiliations:	(A): Wilkes University (B): University of Richmond (C): Pennsylvania State University

We wished to measure the distance from the pollen parent to the mother tree in native oak forests. To do so we have collected DNA samples from all 388 adult oak trees found in a 100 by 200 m transect at Hawk Mountain Nature Preserve in SE Pennsylvania. We then collected at least 20 acorns from a red oak (Quercus rubra) and a chestnut oak (Q. prinus) at each corner of the transect and from the center ( 5 trees of each species total). We are now extracting DNA from the embryo and cotyledons of each acorn. We will next determine the DNA fingerprint of each acorn using ten primer pairs that detect polymorphic STRs. We will then attempt identifying the pollen parent by seeing whether the non-maternal alleles match any tree within the transect (assuming that alleles which do not match the mother tree must have come from the father). We are also using polymorphic cpDNA sequences to confirm the identity of the mother.