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The problem with the Darling 58 genetically modified chestnut tree
The fight to save America’s iconic tree has become a civil war.
Merkel called in William A. Murrill, a mycologist at the New York Botanical Garden, and the two men spent the next year identifying a fungus now known as Cryphonectria parasitica, imported on ornamental Asian chestnut trees. The blight enters via small wounds in the bark made by weather or insects and eats its way through before the trunk erupts open with a warty canker full of “yellowish-brown fruiting pustules,” which release spores to infect nearby trees, wrote Murrill. Last spring, while foundation scientists in the field were wondering what could be wrong with the trees, Thomas Klak, an environmental-science professor at the University of New England in Portland, Maine,was struggling to produce Darling 58 plants with two copies of the OxO gene.
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