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Once plentiful , the American chestnut tree has largely disappeared , killed off by a deadly fungus that start felling the trees 100 days ago .
This calendar month , researchers from the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry ( ESF ) in Syracuse , N.Y. , are planning to plant 10 chestnut treeswith a tweaked gene that they believe will help the tree stave in offthe pathogen that brought their ruin .
A mighty chestnut tree at the turn of the 20th century. The species was largely wiped out.
William Powell , a works biotechnology expert at ESF , and his colleague Charles Maynard , have incorporated a gene into the test Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree that they derived from a breed of pale yellow . The gene has been shown to increase resistivity in hybrid poplar trees to fungal pathogens .
The American chestnut tree was once a prevalent coinage in the timberland of the eastern United States ; it accounted for 25 percentage of thetrees in the forest . A good for you chestnut tree tree diagram can grow more than 100 ft ( 30 meters ) improbable and appraise 10 metrical foot ( 3 cadence ) in diameter .
Not only do the trees produce chestnut — great for feeding wildlife and humans alike — but their wood is rot - tolerant and tight - uprise , Powell pronounce , which was of import for the baseball bat industry .
A mighty chestnut tree at the turn of the 20th century. The species was largely wiped out.
" We really want to add [ the chestnut tree ] back . The only path it can come back is to make a resistive tree , because no one has been able to manipulate the blight any other way , " Powell read in a statement .
The hybrid chestnut trees are slated to be planted at a test site in the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx on April 18 . The locating is significant .
" That ’s a pit ’s throw — literally across the street — from where the blight was identify in 1904 , " Maynard said in a statement .
A dead chestnut, killed off by blight.
The trees slat to be imbed in the Botanical Garden are among more than 100 mixed bag oftransgenic American chestnutsthat are being tested in field visitation or waiting to be tested for blight resistance .
