On May 22, 2013, researchers from the Genome Sciences Centre at BC Cancer Agency, the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, and the University LavalMega announced the genomes of spruce species was decoded.

At 20-30 billion base-pairs and up to 10 times larger than the human genome, the white spruce genome, published in Bioinformatics, and the Norway spruce genome, published in Nature, are also the largest genome sequence assemblies to date.