Four billion American chestnut trees were killed by a deadly fungus. In the quest for its revival, can scientists learn to build a better tree?
By the time Rex Mann was old enough to work in the forests of Appalachia, they were full of the dead.
Emerald ash borer, sudden oak death, Dutch elm disease, oak wilt disease, walnut canker, hemlock woolly adelgid—in a globalizing world, many trees are facing pandemics of their own. And now climate change, with its catastrophic droughts, floods, and heat waves, is making it especially difficult to fight off attackers.
In their attempts to save the chestnuts, foresters have sprayed the trees with fungicides, infected them with fungus-killing viruses, and even burned infected trees to the ground. Efforts to breed American chestnuts with Chinese counterparts to create a hybrid resistant to the blight began as early as the 1930s and in earnest in the 1950s. The American Chestnut Foundation began formal work on the hybrid in the 1980s.
His eureka moment came when he learned of a wheat gene that enhanced pathogen resistance in tomatoes. The gene produces oxalate oxidase—OxO for short—an enzyme that breaks down the acid produced by the blight fungus, rendering it harmless. By 2014 Maynard and Powell had successfully added this wheat gene to the chestnut’s genome. They christened the modified tree Darling 58, after Herb Darling, an engineer and avid supporter of their work.
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