Alabama joins the fight to bring back the American chestnut tree (al.com)

[eppur_se_muova]

By Lee Roop | [email protected]
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on December 26, 2016 at 5:30 AM, updated December 26, 2016 at 5:31 AM

"Chestnuts roasting on an open fire ..."

Most of us know this opening line of a classic Christmas carol, but it was more than a bygone image for most of American history. American chestnut trees, 4 billion strong, dominated the forests from Alabama to Maine from colonial times to the early 1900s. Their wood built American homes, and their nuts were so popular that, well, people wrote songs about them.

That was all before a fungus wiped out most of America's chestnuts starting in the 1880s. Billions of trees died, and it was more than loss of a holiday snack. The chestnut was a serious food source for animals and humans. Chestnut flour was an ingredient in Southern recipes for decades.

Some American chestnuts survive in Alabama and elsewhere in the East, and passionate people have been trying to bring the tree back through specialized breeding programs. Now, Huntsville's HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology is joining the fight. Institute researchers will sequence the DNA of American chestnuts that survived to establish a scientific profile.

"If we can develop tools to do this with chestnuts, we can do this with almost any forest tree species," said Jeremy Schmutz, co-director of the HudsonAlpha Genome Sequencing Center. "This is a major issue now. You probably know about things like ash bore killing off all the ash trees, about the sudden oak death in California, which is being brought on in part by the drought. What we're seeing is many new pathogens ... entering our American ecosystem and causing major issues in the forests."
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more: http://www.al.com/news/huntsville/index.ssf/2016/12/alabama_joins_the_fight_to_bri.html
related: http://www.democraticunderground.com/112796037

[braddy]

1. Let's do it, I love the idea of perennial food all over America, many variations of trees and plants

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Appleseed

[NickB79]

2. I have several dozen seed-grown hybrid chestnut saplings in my yard

I had over 100 of them 3 years ago, but let our harsh winters wittle away the weak. Mostly they're American and Chinese genetics, with some Japanese and European here and there. There are several that are showing real promise so far. And I have another gallon batch of seed in the fridge from a few different cultivars stratifying for spring planting now.

Once the hardiest survivors start bearing nuts in a few years, I'll start propagating and planting them locally in the nearby state lands to see how they fare.

[NNadir]

3. I have been following this case for many years.

I had no idea that there were survivors in Alabama with a full genome.

Several years ago, a survivor in Michigan was cut down by vandals. I wanted to cry.

Of course, the American government was cut down by Michigan and Alabama, and somehow, for cases like the Chestnut and half a million other environmental issues, that is also tragic.