Ash Trees Are Fighting Back Against Ash Dieback

Ash trees are fighting back by rapidly evolving some resistance to ash dieback disease

Ash trees are fighting back, DNA sequencing shows young trees are more likely to have gene variants that confer partial resistance to a fungus that has been wiping out ash trees across Europe.

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FIND US ON

Ash trees in the UK are rapidly evolving resistance in response to ash dieback disease, DNA sequencing of hundreds of trees has shown.

The finding is good news, says Richard Buggs at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in the UK, but it is unlikely that ash trees will become completely resistant in the near future. “We probably need a breeding programme so that we can help nature along and finish the job,” he says.

Ash dieback is caused by a fungus (Hymenoscyphus fraxineus) native to Asia that slowly destroys trees’ ability to transport water. It began spreading in Europe in the 1990s and reached the UK in 2012.

The death of ash trees leads to the release of carbon dioxide and affects hundreds of species that rely on these trees for their habitat. Falling trees are also a threat to people and property. “There’s a lot of ash close to footpaths and roads that is now quite dangerous,” says Buggs.

Because the fungus takes much longer to kill large trees than young ones, Buggs’s team was able to compare the genomes of 128 adult European ash trees (Fraxinus excelsior) and 458 saplings at a site called Marden Park in Surrey. This revealed that thousands of variants his team had previously shown to be linked to resistance were more common in the young trees – probably because those that lacked them had died off.

“We are so glad that these findings suggest that ash will not go the way of the elm in Britain. Elm trees have struggled to evolve to Dutch elm disease, but ash are showing a very different dynamic because they produce an abundance of seedlings upon which natural selection can act when they are still young. Through the death of millions of ash trees, a more resistant population of ash is appearing.”

Buggs added: “Lots of textbooks about evolution have hypothetical examples of natural selection driving change in quantitative traits (for example, size and speed of wolves) but these are actually hard to prove in real life cases. Here, we provide a real example which is characterised at the DNA level.”