The USDA Should Let People Plant Blight-Resistant American Chestnut Trees
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for guy_:
The USDA Should Let People Plant Blight-Resistant American Chestnut Trees:
For more than 30 years, the American Chestnut Foundation (ACF) has been engaged in a privately financed program in which its geneticists have been crossbreeding American chestnuts with blight-resistant Chinese chestnuts. The goal is to produce an American chestnut tree that retains essentially only the blight resistance genes from the Chinese chestnut tree.
More recently, the ACF has been collaborating with researchers at the State University of New York's College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF) to use modern biotechnology to endow American chestnut trees with blight resistance. To that end, the researchers have added a gene from wheat that produces the enzyme oxalate oxidase that breaks down the oxalic acid the fungus uses to attack chestnut trees. It works; the added gene does indeed protect American chestnuts from the blight.
Now the ACF and ESF researchers are officially petitioning the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to give their blight-resistant American chestnut "nonregulated status" which would allow the blight-tolerant bioengineered trees to be planted without restriction as part of restoration programs.
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