"It's just pretty cool to study such an iconic organism," says co-author Rozenn Pineau, a plant evolutionary geneticist at the University of Chicago in Illinois. "I think it's important to draw people's attention on natural wonders of the world."
Pando - whose name means 'I spread' in Latin - consists of some 47,000 stems that cover an area of 42.6 hectares in Utah's Fishlake National Forest.
They were also able to track patterns of genetic variation spread throughout the tree that offer clues about how it has adapted and evolved over the course of its lifetime.
As a result, Pando cannot reproduce sexually and mix its DNA with that of other trees, and instead creates clones of itself.
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