American chestnut Concepts

Mini Farming: Self-Sufficiency on 1/4 Acre

by Brett L. Markham · 14 Apr 2010 · 252pp · 73,387 words

Black walnut, hickory, pecan, and hican 50 feet in all direc tions English and Persian walnut 35 feet in all direc tions Chestnut (Chinese, most American chestnuts succumbed to the chestnut blight) 40 feet in all direc tions Filberts 15 feet in all direc tions Keep in mind that nut trees produce

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the United States before 1900 through the importation of various Asian chestnut species that carry the causative fungus but are resistant to it themselves. The American chestnut, native to Eastern North America, has no resistance to this fungus; within a generation this majestic tree, soaring up to 100 feet and measuring up

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threat. To put the impact of chestnut blight into perspective, it is estimated that in 1900, 25% of all the trees in the Appalachians were American chestnuts. There are four ways of dealing with chestnut blight: prompt removal of infected branches, treatment of cankers in existing trees for five years with injections

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through repetitive backcrossing and selection to maximize native DNA content while retaining resistance genes.47 Mini-farmers interested in growing and preserving American chestnuts should seek guidance (and seeds!) from the American Chestnut Cooperators’ Foundation (www.accf-online.org). Farmers interested in resistant Asian stocks can find suitable varieties at local nurseries. Pecan scab

Life as We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined--And Redefined--Nature

by Beth Shapiro · 15 Dec 2021 · 338pp · 105,112 words

stack of paperwork in one hand and a small, mounted display in the other in which a brightly colored passenger pigeon stood on a thin American chestnut branch. Threading her way toward us through the cabinets, Malgosia’s eyes sparkled with a combination of motherly pride and admiration. Her voice cracked with

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turn of the twentieth century, the Appalachian forests of the eastern United States were dominated by the tall, broad, fast-growing, and prolific American chestnut tree, Castanea dentata. American chestnuts had been part of the landscape for hundreds of thousands of years, their massive bodies and seasonal seed crop providing room to some and

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after the trees began to die, William Murrill, curator of the New York Botanical Garden, identified the cause: a fungus known as Cryphonectria parasitica. The American chestnut trees in Murrill’s gardens started showing signs of the disease around 1904, but scientists now believe the fungus entered the United States years earlier

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fungal spores capable of infecting neighboring trees. Within fifty years of the first tree death, all 4 billion American chestnut trees across their native range had succumbed to the fungus. Although the grand American chestnut stands disappeared from eastern forests by the mid-twentieth century, 70 years later some trees are still not entirely

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up baby trees every so often that survive for a short time, rarely long enough to flower, before succumbing to the blight. Small stands of American chestnuts also survive in pockets of the American Midwest and Northwest, where they were planted by settlers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Unfortunately, even

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these isolated stands are now threatened. The largest surviving stand—a nearly 100-year-old cluster of American chestnut trees near West Salem, Wisconsin—began showing signs of fungal infection in 1987. The American chestnut is, in a filling-its-ecological-niche sense, extinct. But the zombie shoots and expat trees provide what

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every de-extinction scientist desperately wants: living cells. Efforts to fill the vacant niche of the American chestnuts in eastern forests began in the 1920s. When imported fungus-resistant Chinese chestnuts failed to thrive in the American habitat, plant breeders tried to hybridize

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did inherit resistance to the fungal disease, they fared poorly, presumably because such a large portion of their genomes had evolved elsewhere. In 1983, The American Chestnut Foundation was established, kicking off a decades-long quest to find a cure to chestnut blight. TACF was founded as a collaboration of conservation-minded

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State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Their first project was to improve hybrid trees by increasing the amount of American chestnut DNA in their genomes. TACF scientists embarked on a thirty-plus-year backcrossing program in which they bred resistant hybrids with pure

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American chestnuts. With each generation, the proportion of American chestnut DNA in each tree’s genome increased. Today, after three generations, these trees are 85 percent American chestnut and 15 percent Chinese chestnut. However, they also have reduced resistance to the fungal

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a comeback. Today, TACF supports forty restoration stands of hybrid trees across the former native range of the American chestnut. The American Chestnut Foundation’s hybrid trees are good but not great replicas of purebred American chestnuts. The problem is that hybridization is imprecise and slow. It’s difficult to control which parts of the genome

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guide breeding selection, but this requires that breeders know precisely what part of the genome causes the resistance trait, which is not the case for American chestnuts. Of course, if the genes underlying resistance were known, one would not need to resort to the genomic messiness of hybridization and breeding selection. One

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, both professors at SUNY-ESF, developed the technological and biological know-how to create a transgenic American chestnut tree that is resistant to the fungal blight, and then they went ahead and did it. Their transgenic American chestnut tree is currently being evaluated by the US Environmental Protection Agency for release into the wild

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these threats. Powell and Maynard began by learning how these other plants dealt with acid-producing fungi. They transferred a few fungi-neutralizing genes into American chestnut genomes and saw that one gene—a wheat gene that produces an enzyme called oxalate oxidase—was particularly successful at conferring blight resistance on chestnut

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this doesn’t kill the fungus, it also reduces evolutionary pressure for the fungus to escape control. As a consequence, the fungus can coexist with American chestnuts, as it does with Chinese and Japanese chestnuts. There is other good news related to this particular transgene. Because it is a gene from a

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also produced by lots of agriculturally important plants, we eat a lot of it all the time. Should someone choose to enjoy a roasted transgenic American chestnut (which I intend to do as soon as possible), the proportion of oxalate oxidase in their diet would barely change. The team’s initial evaluations

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of transgenic American chestnut trees revealed more welcome news: trees that inherited only a single copy of the wheat oxalic acetate gene are resistant to blight. Because trees only

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adaptations that survive in the zombie trees and expat populations can be bred easily into the transgenic population. The full diversity of the functionally extinct American chestnut population can be re-created without diluting their genomes—apart from the addition of one tiny gene that evolved in wheat. The regulatory approval process

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for the blight-tolerant American chestnut tree has been complicated. As this is the first transgenic organism seeking approval for release into the wild rather than for use as a drug

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blight-resistant chestnuts, it is reviewing the documents and experimental data submitted by the research team. The EPA also has regulatory authority over blight-tolerant American chestnuts through the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act because the added oxalic acetate qualifies as a “plant incorporated protectant,” or PIP. And, because the native

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range of the American chestnut tree includes most of the eastern continent, the transgenic chestnut trees will also need to be approved by Canadian regulatory agencies, which Powell hopes will

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be expedited by his experience with the approval process in the United States. In the meantime, the quest to restore the American chestnut tree continues. In 2019, transgenic, blight-tolerant American chestnut trees were planted at sites across several states, marking the start of a multistate, long-term ecological research project that will

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explore how eastern forests respond when American chestnut trees are restored. The TACF-and-SUNY team is filling nurseries with transgenic, blight-tolerant trees descended from the first outcrossing experiments in preparation for

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continues to increase the genetic diversity of the resurrected population, which one day may be used to restore entire forest ecosystems. Those who oppose the American chestnut restoration project worry about the unintended consequences of an experiment that might be hard if not impossible to undo. After all

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been functionally gone from these forests for nearly a century, and the forests may have adapted to their absence. If so, then returning American chestnuts may destabilize the current ecosystem in an unpredictable way. My own opinion is that the ecological risks in this specific case are few and far

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by intended rewards—a return to the ecosystem of the nutritional and structural benefits of a tree that never entirely disappeared. The success of the American chestnut tree demonstrates the power of synthetic biology to help species adapt and survive, even if that means drawing evolutionary innovations from across the tree of

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, for pushing me to believe that I could actually write it. Now, I’m off to find out whether I can import a genetically modified American chestnut tree into California. Discover Your Next Great Read Get sneak peeks, book recommendations, and news about your favorite authors. Tap here to learn more. © PETER

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rescue the black-footed ferret is described on the Revive & Restore website. Popkin (2020) explores the history of American chestnut trees, their near extinction, and efforts to save them from that fate. The science behind transgenic American chestnut trees is detailed by Powell et al. (2019). Newhouse and Powell (2021) present their argument for

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American chestnut restoration using genetic engineering. Ferguson (2018) describes the global scale of the problem of vector-borne diseases and reviews

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National Academy of Sciences 113: 838–846. Newhouse AE, Powell WA. 2021. Intentional introgression of a blight tolerance transgene to rescue the remnant population of American chestnut. Conservation Science and Practice. https://doi.org/10.1111/csp2.348. Noble C, Min J, Olejarz J, Buchthal J, Chavez A, Smidler AL, DeBenedictis EA

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National Academy of Sciences 116: 8275–8282. Popkin G. 2020 April 30. Can genetic engineering bring back the American chestnut? New York Times Magazine. Powell WA, Newhouse AE, Coffey V. 2019. Developing blight-tolerant American chestnut trees. Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology 11: a034587. Sarchet P. 2017 February 16. Can we grow woolly

A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

by Bill Bryson · 8 Sep 2010 · 331pp · 106,256 words

quite recent times—painfully recent times—one thing remained in abundance that preserved the primeval super-Eden feel of the original forest: the massively graceful American chestnut. There has never been a tree like it. Rising a hundred feet from the forest floor, its soaring boughs spread out in a canopy of

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a tree encounters an attacker for which evolution has left it unprepared, and seldom has a tree been more helpless against an invader than the American chestnut against Endothia parasitica. It enters a chestnut effortlessly, devours the cambium cells, and positions itself for attack on the next tree before the tree has

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the hundreds of millions in each canker. A single woodpecker can transfer a billion spores on one flight between trees. At the height of the American chestnut blight, every woodland breeze would lose spores in uncountable trillions to drift in a pretty, lethal haze on to neighboring hillsides. The mortality rate was

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100 percent. In just over thirty-five years the American chestnut became a memory. The Appalachians alone lost four billion trees, a quarter of its cover, in a generation. A great tragedy, of course. But how

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. An untreatable fungal disease called anthracnose is wiping out the lovely dogwoods not just here but everywhere in America. Before long, the dogwood, like the American chestnut and American elm, will effectively cease to exist. It would be hard, in short, to conceive a more stressed environment. And yet here’s the

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto

by Stewart Brand · 15 Mar 2009 · 422pp · 113,525 words

resistant variety by crossbreeding with the Chinese chestnut (which is immune to the blight) failed utterly. In Susan Freinkel’s lovely book on the subject, American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree (2007), the rebirth refers to efforts to genetically engineer a blight-resistant

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American chestnut. Two researchers made a derivative of a frog gene they thought would do the trick, but everyone told them they mustn’t put a frog

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gene in a plant that people eat. A forest biotech company named ArborGen approached the American Chestnut Foundation, offering to support research on a GE chestnut. They were turned away, of course. But research is going ahead anyway; I bet that an

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American chestnut 2.0 will be thriving by the 2020s and that Greens will welcome it by the end of that decade. In Intervention: Confronting the Real

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crisis, peak world population, Chernobyl National Park, GE poplars in China, the future opinions of Amory Lovins and Bjørn Lomborg, the engineered revival of the American chestnut, and GE biocontrol organisms for restoration. Formal, falsifiable versions of the predictions, complete with my detailed argument in each case, have been placed on a

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. Alexie, Sherman algae Algeny (Rifkin) alien invasives Allen, William Alley, Richard AllianceBernstein All Species Inventory Amazon rain forest Ambedkar, B. R. Ambio Amboseli National Park American Chestnut (Freinkel) American Chestnut Foundation America Needs Indians America’s Ancient Forests (Bonnicksen) Ames, Bruce Ammann, Klaus Anastas, Paul Anderson, Kat Anderson, Rip Andreae, Meinrat Angel, Roger Archer

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Gaia hypothesis Gandhi, Mohandas K. Garreau, Joel Gates, Bill GenBank gene flow generation IV reactors gene splicing Genetically Modified Planet (Stewart) genetic engineering agriculture and American chestnut and GE vs. GM as abbreviation for gene transfer as intellectual property issue and mammoths and medicine and opposition to organic farming and pest control

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by Charles C. Mann · 8 Aug 2005 · 666pp · 189,883 words

). Chestnut was especially popular—not the imported European chestnut roasted on Manhattan street corners in the fall, but the smaller, soft-shelled, deeply sweet native American chestnut, now almost extinguished by chestnut blight. In colonial times, as many as one out of every four trees in between southeastern Canada and Georgia was

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; Woods 2003. See also, Holden 1996, Neumann 2002:150–51. Haudenosaunee villages: Day 1953:332–34 (six square miles, Denonville, 333; “hundreds of acres,” 338). American chestnuts: Kummer 2003; Mann and Plummer 2002. “They pound them”: Bartram 1996:56. For many groups in the Southeast, milk from mast was the only kind

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

by Elizabeth Kolbert · 15 Mar 2021 · 221pp · 59,755 words

rejiggering the genes of the bird’s closest living relative, the band-tailed pigeon. Much closer to realization is an effort to bring back the American chestnut tree. The tree, once common in the eastern United States, was all but wiped out by chestnut blight. (The blight, a fungal pathogen introduced in

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from Japan. If we can correct for our earlier tragic mistake by shifting just one more gene around, don’t we owe it to the American chestnut to do so? The ability to “rewrite the very molecules of life” places us, it could be argued, under an obligation. Of course, the argument

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

by Elizabeth Kolbert · 11 Feb 2014 · 308pp · 94,447 words

) before, the new host has no defenses against it. Such “novel interactions,” as they’re called, can be spectacularly deadly. In the eighteen hundreds, the American chestnut was the dominant deciduous tree in eastern forests; in places like Connecticut, it made up close to half the standing timber. (The tree, which can

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the standing timber: Van Driesche and Van Driesche, Nature out of Place, 123. “not only was baby’s crib”: George H. Hepting, “Death of the American Chestnut,” Forest and Conservation History 18 (1974): 60. According to a study: Paul Somers, “The Invasive Plant Problem,” http://www.mass.gov/eea/docs/dfg/nhesp

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: W. Junk, 1981. Hedeen, Stanley. Big Bone Lick: The Cradle of American Paleontology. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008. Hepting, George H. “Death of the American Chestnut.” Forest and Conservation History 18 (1974): 60–67. Herbert, Sandra. Charles Darwin, Geologist. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005. Herrmann, E., et al. “Humans

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(Atelopus zeteki) Panamanian robber Pristimantis Rabbs' fringe-limbed tree Sandhill San Jose Cochran southern day spring peepers Warzewitsch wood Frozen Zoo Fuhlrott, Johann Carl fungi American chestnut and bat die-off and frog die-off and Funk Island (formerly Isle of Birds) Galápagos gannets Garb, Matt garlic mustard Geobios geographic distribution (dispersal

The World Without Us

by Alan Weisman · 5 Aug 2008 · 482pp · 106,041 words

. And although many of New York’s heirloom trees are endangered if not actually dying, few if any are already extinct. Even the deeply mourned American chestnut, devastated everywhere after a fungal blight entered New York around 1900 in a shipment of Asian nursery plants, still hangs on in the New York

The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century

by Ronald Bailey · 20 Jul 2015 · 417pp · 109,367 words

forests to grow, and the more productive the trees, the more the land that can be spared for nature. Biotechnology could also restore the majestic American chestnut to its home in the forests of the eastern United States. In the early twentieth century, chestnut blight fungus introduced from overseas devastated

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American chestnuts—the then-dominant trees in eastern forests stretching from Maine to Mississippi. Researchers at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and

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Forestry (SUNY), working with the American Chestnut Research and Restoration Project, used genetic engineering techniques to introduce a gene from wheat that confers strong blight resistance into American chestnut trees. They recently ceremonially planted some of the new blight-resistant chestnuts at the New

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

by Jared Diamond · 2 Jan 2008 · 801pp · 242,104 words

, agricultural weeds like Spotted Knapweed and Leafy Spurge (Chapter 1), pests and pathogens of trees and crops and livestock (like the blights that wiped out American chestnut trees and devasted American elms), the water hyacinth that chokes waterways, the zebra mussels that choke power plants, and the lampreys that devastated the former