BRINGING BACK AN AMERICAN GIANT

We've got some amazing news on our nation's 250th birthday, as genetic modification may be bringing back a giant to the forests of the Eastern United States. Not the mammoth, mastodon, but it is a species that played a huge role in the ecosystems that it's been missing from for over half a century. This is the American Chestnut, Castanea dentata, a species that was once called the perfect tree, the amount of nuts it would produce and the quality of wood. A bit of history. There were a lot of people that were bringing lots of plants and animals to the US. And people liked chestnut trees. In 1773, Thomas Jefferson brought a European Chestnut tree to North America. 1876, Japanese Chestnut, Castanea crenata. Thomas Jefferson's off-hook, nothing real bad came from that. However, Thomas Hogg, over 100 years later, he returned from Japan with a Japanese Chestnut. And that species from Japan brought an airborne fungus called Chestnut Blight. And within 50 years, that Chestnut Blight would move through the American Chestnut population, removing one of the most important trees from the Eastern United States and reshaping ecosystems. Bears, deer, passenger pigeons, lots of animals relied on these trees. However, the trees never completely disappeared, because blight only affects the part above ground. And like the root system, the root systems will still survive. They'll try to send up new sprouts. The blight, though, the blight doesn't allow those sprouts to survive. So functionally, the adult trees have ceased to exist. Lots of work over the decades and trying to bring back this species, make it functionally exist again. To selectively breed, try to hybridize, tried genetic modification. It's been really promising. But now we have a press release from SilvaBio and Foray Bioscience, FAB Seed for American Chestnut Restoration. To be excited about the return of this species. It starts with SilvaBio's work with Darling 54. Darling 54. This American Chestnut lineage right here. What they have done is they have inserted a gene that helps it survive when it's impacted by the blight. The gene is known as OxO, oxalate oxidase, common in lots of different plants. They have evolved this to help them deal with the weapon that fungus uses. The Japanese Chestnut, for example, they can survive that blight because they've evolved alongside it. They have adaptations similar to this. This is not the same one, this is taken from a wheat. They are effectively giving these plants the genetic tools they need, not to be immune to the blight, but to be able to tolerate it and live into adulthood again. Darling 54 and this work isn't brand new. The problem people were running into was trying to take this and scale it, bring forests back, not just a few individual trees. And that's where this foray, Bioscience comes in. Making seeds the natural way takes time. You've got to wait for those generations to kind of accumulate, and then you need to get variation. Foray Bioscience, they create seeds from cells. So we have an amazing partnership between two groups, Bioscience groups working on conservation. Introduction. Harvest-free production, at scale. We grow plant products without the plant. Using nature's building block, the single cell, we direct how plant matter forms. We produce materials, molecules, and even seeds, by steering plant cells to precisely create the products we need-and nothing more. This creates a new layer of supply that scales without scaling extraction. And I just, this is really exciting. This is a big step in those Eastern forests. About trying to bring back ecosystems, bring back what has been lost through genetic modification, which is a very real tool for conservation that is changing can impact our planet in a positive way. What you think. Stuff, there's always people on either side. I personally think this is a very valuable tool. It's awesome that this is kind of being brought to the next stage.