North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

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On Jun 15, 2004, at 2:45 PM, Lucky Pittman wrote:

> At 05:42 PM 6/15/2004 +0000, Tanis wrote:
> > I happened to see the May 04 issue of Discovery magazine; article 
> > about progress in breeding a blight-resistant population of american 
> > chestnuts, or at least finding a fungus which will fight the blight.  
> > I found it interesting enough to mention on this list.
>
> Tanis,
> Couldn't access the entire article, but since it mentioned Gary 
> Griffin, I'm presuming it detailed the work of Gary, his wife Louise, 
> the VA Tech folks, and all the American Chestnut Cooperators 
> Foundation volunteers who are working to 'revive' the American 
> Chestnut with a breeding program utilizing only 'pure' American 
> chestnut genetics.
> ACCF, being largely a volunteer organization, often seems to take a 
> back seat in media coverage to The American Chestnut Foundation, which 
> appears to be better funded - but TACF is using an infusion of Chinese 
> chestnut genetics to provide blight resistance, rather than selecting 
> pure American trees which exhibit innate resistance to infection with 
> the blight fungus.
>
> For anyone interested, please check out the ACCF website at:
> http://ipm.ppws.vt.edu/griffin/accf.html
>
> Lucky

Although from what I hear, the American Chestnut Foundation has 
isolated the ~6 genes that determine resistance in Chinese Chestnuts, 
and are backbreeding with American Chestnut to create a hybrid with 
those six genes and nearly nothing else from the Chinese tree.  I 
thought it was a neat idea.

Ginda