By Susan Milius
“You’ve mistaken a fungus for a pine tree” can be a ticklish thing for one botanist to say to another. Yet, in the 1990s, one respected university researcher made that very accusation to another. Stories such as this have spiced botanist gossip for years, but in this case, the two scientists resolved their differences and published a paper telling the whole story.
In the mid-1990s, Aaron Liston of Oregon State University in Corvallis was studying the evolutionary history of pine trees and managed to sequence a long stretch of DNA from pine needles. “It was still a big deal in those days,” he says. He searched databases for genetic sequences from similar pine trees and found some that didn’t match his results at all.