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Genetic engineering was meant to save chestnut trees. Then there was a mistake.
(www.washingtonpost.com)
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The team was meant to be working with a tree dubbed Darling 58, developed by the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY ESF).
But Andrew Newhouse, director of chestnut restoration at SUNY ESF, said his team is moving forward with seeking federal approval to begin distributing seeds to the public — but without the 5,000-member foundation as its longtime partner and financial backer.
After years of fruitless efforts to use traditional breeding to produce blight-resistant American chestnuts, SUNY ESF scientists developed a series of genetically engineered trees meant to do so.
About a decade ago, the team started inserting into the chestnuts’ DNA a gene that produced an enzyme to neutralize a chemical secreted by the fungus that helps it kill and eat tree tissue.
At the University of New England, Thomas Klak was “speed breeding” the transgenic chestnuts under grow lights but was having trouble producing many plants with two copies of the gene to fight the blight.
After he enlisted the help of Ek Han Tan, a geneticist at the University of Maine, to analyze the chestnut’s genome, they made their discovery this fall: The plants they were working on were, in fact, not Darling 58 trees.
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