This holiday season it's probably not American chestnuts roasting on an open fire because the species is nearly extinct. Researchers at SUNY-ESF are working to develop blight-tolerant American Chestnut trees.
American Chestnut Trees were threatened by disease more than 100 years ago. This chestnut blight is caused by an invasive fungus that enters the bark of the tree.
“Then it starts to infect, but it primarily uses a couple of toxins, a couple of different acids and enzymes that can kill the tree tissue,” Andrew Newhouse, the director of the American Chestnut Research and Restoration Project at SUNY-ESF, said. "It kills what we call a cambium, the living tissue under the bark of the American chestnut."
Newhouse says more than 99% of American Chestnut Trees that would produce big nut crops are gone — so people have turned to other sources.
“Many of those come from Europe or Asia, and there are some of those food varieties of chestnuts that are very good to eat and can be grown here as well," Newhouse said. "But those aren't the same as the trees that we would want to restore to a forest and would have the same ecological interactions as full American chestnuts did.”
But Newhouse said they’re working to revitalize the American chestnut, by adding a new gene to the tree to allow them to survive in the face of blight.
“It's not a fungicide," Newhouse said. "It's not preventing the trees from being infected by blight, but rather it's allowing them to survive with less damage.”
Survival is key. Blight is so widespread in our forests so hope of eradication or planting trees in new locations where it's not found isn’t an option. Newhouse said the results of the genetically modified trees have been promising so far.
And he acknowledges there won’t be a single solution to restoring chestnuts, but is hopeful the work being done is an important step in the broader realm of restoration.
Federal approval for public distribution of the SUNY-ESF tree was delayed after scientists noticed a labeling mixup between the Darling 58 and Darling 54, though Newhouse says the two are nearly identical with the difference being where the blight-resistant gene is inserted into the tree’s genome.
