Solutions & Good News Active Updated Jul 23, 2026
Bringing back the American chestnut
A fungal blight introduced from East Asia in the early 1900s wiped out billions of American chestnut trees. Researchers and startups are now using a blight-tolerance gene, genomic prediction and speed-breeding to restore the species, with hopes of applying the same approach to other pest-hit hardwoods like elm, ash and oak.
The story so far
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Jul 23, 2026 Latest
The Conversation reported that OXO, a single inserted wheat gene that for about 20 years looked like it might make American chestnuts fully blight-resistant on its own, is underperforming in recent field results, prompting researchers to design new genetic strategies informed by the tree's full genome rather than betting on one gene.
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Jul 21, 2026
Biotech startup SilvaBio, co-founded by Andrew Serazin, used genomic prediction and a speed-breeding process that compresses a normal ten-year breeding cycle to about one year to develop blight-tolerant American chestnuts. A double-blinded trial of its Darling54 cultivar, built on a gene developed at SUNY's College of Environmental Science and Forestry, found blight damage orders of magnitude smaller than in ordinary chestnuts.
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