University of Cambridge discover entirely new wood type that could be highly efficient at carbon storage

As per their discovery, the scientists found that there are two species Tulip Tree and Chinese Tulip Tree which have much larger macrofibrils than their hardwood relatives.

Sainsbury Laboratory at Cambridge University and Jagiellonian University, Poland have found that Tulip Trees have a unique type of wood and they can grow more than 30 metres. They grow so fast and tall when the earth's atmospheric CO2 concentrations are relatively low.

Their discovery gives new opportunities by planting a fast-growing tree to improve carbon capture and storage in plantation forests or breeding Tulip Tree-like wood into other tree species. The new type of wood does not fit into either category of softwood or hardwood.

Microscopy Core Facility Manager at the Sainsbury Laboratory, Dr Raymond Wightman, said, “We analysed some of the world’s most iconic trees like the Coast Redwood, Wollemi Pine and so-called 'living fossils' such as Amborella trichopoda, which is the sole surviving species of a family of plants that were the earliest still existing group to evolve separately from all other flowering plants. Our survey data has given us new insights into the evolutionary relationships between wood nanostructure and the cell wall composition, which differs across the lineages of angiosperm and gymnosperm plants. Angiosperm cell walls possess characteristic narrower elementary units, called macrofibrils, compared to gymnosperms.” 

New discovery was part of previous survey

The university had conducted an evolutionary survey of the microscopic structure of wood from 33 tree species and this discovery was part of the survey. The study was about how wood ultrastructure evolved across hardwoods and softwoods.

Lead author Dr Naaheed Mukadam (UCL Psychiatry) said, “There is a growing body of research demonstrating that dementia rates could be reduced by targeting risk factors throughout the lifespan. Smoking, drinking, and high blood pressure are among numerous risk factors that increase the likelihood of a person developing dementia later in life, which could be targeted by public health interventions. While most of the initiatives we studied are not designed with dementia reduction as an aim, in many cases their impact on dementia risk is so great that they pay for themselves by impact on dementia costs alone, which should be routinely considered as part of cost-benefit evaluations.”

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