| Budget Amount *help |
¥3,700,000 (Direct Cost: ¥3,700,000)
Fiscal Year 1998: ¥900,000 (Direct Cost: ¥900,000)
Fiscal Year 1997: ¥2,800,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,800,000)
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| Research Abstract |
The most parts of Honshu Island were covered by boreal conifer forests during the Last Glacial Age. From sedimentations of those age, there are much amounts of fossil cones with beautiful preservation. But, to identify them in species level only bymorphological characters is very difficult because of close similarity in morphology. Therefore, we tried to extract chioroplast DNA from those fossils and to identify there by mean of DNA sequence. For this purpose1 we collected extant conifers such as Picea bicolor r, P jezoensis, P glehnii, P koyamae, P.maximowiczii, P.palita , and P shirasawae and established phylogenetic tree basing on DNA sequence.
Fossil cones were collected from four localities in northern Honshu. Those samples were kept in liquid nitrogen and extracted total DNA, then multiplied by mean of PCR method. We succeed to read DNA sequence from several fossils. DNA of fossils obtained from buried forest in Dekijima, Aomori Prefecture (about 24,000 years ago) was identical with Picea glehnii , while that from buried forest in Gonohe county, Aomori Prefecture (about 13,600 years ago) was identical with Picea koyamae. In both localities there is no distribution of those Picea species. From other two localities, we can not yet success to read DNA.
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