KEY POINTS:
A Rotorua laboratory has won an international contract to clone the world's largest organism, the redwood tree.
The Tree Lab, owned by scientist Jenny Aitken, has been hired by Champion Tree Project International in Michigan to clone over 50 old redwoods from the forests of California.
The clones will then be planted in living "genetic libraries" around the world in order to preserve the diversity of the species.
Thanks to heavy logging, less than 5 per cent of California's old-growth coastal redwood forest remains, National Geographic magazine reported in 2007. In the case of more than 75 per cent of the species' historic range, not even stumps are left.
The Champion Tree Project takes genetic samples from the tops of the old trees and clones them. When the clones are two to three feet tall they will be used to create redwood forests in other parts of the world.
The New Zealand laboratory was chosen for the job because of its internationally recognised expertise in tissue culture of trees, Jenny Aitken said.
"It's pretty exciting for us."
So far Aitken said three trees had been cloned, the Grandma, the Twin Stem and the Old Blue, but there were upwards of 50 to do.
The project would eventually account for up to 15 per cent of the lab's work. Aitken declined to say how much the contract was worth.
There are commercial redwood forests in various parts of the world, including Rotorua. However the varieties being cloned had never been grown commercially, she said. The work had implications for the forestry industry both here and overseas.
"If anything happened to radiata pine, we have strategies in place to have other trees that can rapidly fill the gap. Redwood is one of them on the list at the moment."
The redwood tree grows to a height of around 107m and can live for 1000 years. On average timber trees produce three to four cubic metres of wood per hectare, but redwoods can produce 25 cubic metres a hectare.
The Champion Tree Project International is a non-profit group founded in 1996 by David Milarch, whose family has run a shade tree nursery business for several generations.
In 2003 the project cloned a 200-year-old white ash tree planted by President George Washington in Virginia and gifted it to the US Capitol.
