Potential Problems with Blight-Resistant Chestnuts

For some background on the developing story of creating a blight-resistant American chestnut, please check out the podcast episode a few episodes back with Erik Carlson.

Jared Westbrook is a geneticist with the American Chestnut Federation. In this episode we talk about what went wrong with the initial round of trials for blight-resistant chestnuts, how to combine targeted genetic approaches to hybridizing American and Chinese Chestnut trees for blight resistance, thousands of years of human selection in the chinese chestnut genome as an agricultural species, problems with inheritance for the oXo gene that breaks down oxalic acid, why oxalic acid production might not be all that's involved with the virulence of Chestnut blight, and more. This is a good episode, even for laypeople who may not be familiar with basic genetic science. To learn more about the American Chestnut Federation and to join a local chapter, check out www.tacf.org

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