Speaker 1: Okay, welcome to the crime pace, but botany doesn't podcast.
I'm here on a cold West Texas day with Eric Carlson, PhD,
student at sunny ESF A College of Environmental Sciences and
Forestry and lovely, smooth, loving, caring nurturing Syracuse, New York.
Does that sound like a Do you think that's an
adequate way to sum up Syracuse? Would you call it nurturing?
Is it tender?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I would call it tender. Yeah, that's a beautiful description.
Speaker 1: It is a tender. Okay, that's great. Do you guys
have any massage parlors there?
Speaker 2: I'm sure there's a few.
Speaker 1: There's probably quite a few anyway. Okay, So Eric, I
just want to ask before we get started, what happened?
What happened? You work with American chestnuts. Everybody was so
excited about this transgenic chestnut that was able to resist
Chryphinectara parasitica, the blight by I believe it was digesting
secreting enzymes that digest the oxidalic acid that the fungus produces.
But then everything there was I saw this in the news,
and of course they didn't explain what happened. But they
said that there was some discrepancy and you know, data
was wrong and the whole thing had to be stopped.
What happened.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So about a year ago we made a discovery
that one of our lines that we were using for
government approval referred to as Darling fifty eight, it was
actually a closely related line called Darling fifty four. And
so basically it was a big naming issue where we
needed to go back into our documents and change the
names from Darling fifty eight to Darling fifty four, which
is a little embarrassing but definitely not the end of
the world.
Speaker 1: And so what with Darling fifty eight and Darling fifty four,
I mean, does anybody know they? First off, they both
have this allele right that codes for the digestion of
oxalic acid that renders the fungus just the minor pest
instead of this death now right, they both have that
copy of that allele. Isn't an allele? Can you tell us?
Tell us again, give us a refresher on and what's
going on here with this transgenic chestnut tree.
Speaker 2: Sure, American chestnut is highly susceptible to a necrotrophic fungus
called Cryphenectria parasitica. The fungus attacks the tree by subcreting
oxalic acid, which is toxic to tree tissues. And so
what we did is we inserted a gene from wheat
that codes for an enzyme called oxalate oxidase. And what
that enzyme does is it oxidizes that oxalic acid and
converts it into hydrogen peroxide and CO two, which are
not harmful to the plant. And both Darling fifty eight
and Darling fifty four have the exact same copy of
that gene and it's actually in the same exact clonal background,
so they were that gene was inserted into a bunch
of cells and there are independent events within those cells.
And so both of these fifty four and fifty eight
came from that same experiment, So they're basically genetically identical
except for the place where that gene landed in the genome.
Speaker 1: Okay, so this wow, Okay, So it's not it's at
different locations, different losi in the genome, and that was
that's the only difference, the main difference between fifty eight
and fifty four. Yep, that's right, all right, And this
is a dominant Allele, right, and so to refresh everybody's
memory to get dominant recessive, you know, a whole mental thing.
He's fucking around with the pea flowers, right, the quote
godfather of modern genetics. And so this is a dominant,
it's not recessive. So you only need one copy. You know,
you can be heterozygous for this trait if you're a
chestnut tree, and it'll come true, but you know you've
got to you need that one copy. And if you
only stand a fifty to fifty chance of inheriting that copy,
if say, a transgenic chestnut breeds with a non transgenic
chestnut that's still susceptible to the blight, is that correct?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. Chestnuts are diploid, so they've got two
sets of chromosomes, and this oxogene is only inserted into
one of those sets of chromosomes. And so when the
tree with that single gene goes through myosis to produce
gametes either pollen or egg cells, only fifty percent of
those halfloid cells will have that gene insertion. So therefore
only fifty percent of the offspring from those trees will
inherit the gte.
Speaker 1: Okay, cool and then when you guys are in I
got a question though, too, when you're inserting these genes,
I mean, are Darling fifty eight? Are they all the
same phenotype? They're all the same clone.
Speaker 2: Yes, they're They're all the same clone. That's right, because
the cells are called somatic embryos, and they're all clonally
identical to each other.
Speaker 1: Okay, so there's a lack of genetic diversity, but I'm
sure you guys, I mean, I'm sure that was one
of the first thing you guys thought of, and you were,
you know, planning how to basically get more genetic diversity
using this single clone and then create you know, a
good gene pool that all has this single copy of Eele.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, that's right. We're not making a bunch of
copies of that original transgenic event. What we do from
that original transformant is we get pollen from it, and
then we can take that pollen and cross it onto
wild type mother trees in designated field plots, and then
they'll produce chestnuts, fifty percent of them being transgendic and
fifty percent of them not.
Speaker 1: Okay, but that and and that's the part. It's basically
having to then find which ones got the gene and
which ones didn't. That's like the what's what takes time?
Speaker 2: Right, and each generation of out crossing, you're incorporating more
and more genetic diversity from those mother trees.
Speaker 1: Would it have been possible? I mean, fuck, I guess
I should have listened to our podcast that we did
two or three years ago on this, But would it
have been possible to just take a bunch of different
individual phenotypes and of wild American chestnuts, pure American chestnuts,
not crossbread with Chinese which is resistant to Cryphonecta parasitica.
Chinese chestnuts are resistant to Cryphonectria parasitica because they've had
ten million years of coevolution in the same ecosystem. Would
it have been possible to take that single copy you
know that that what is it the oxogene? You said, yes,
would it? Would it have been possible to take that
in just in certain to like a number of different
phenotypes of wild American chestnut and so you had more
to work with, not just this one fifty eight clone
or what.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that is possible, And that's actually something we've been
working on for a few years now, is getting more
of those sematic embryos into culture, so we can do
new transformations into new clonal backgrounds. The Darling line though,
comes from one sematic embryo line called Ellis, And that's
a really important line because we got the genome sequence
and annotated for that for that clone. So that makes
genome analysis of our transgenic events much simpler. Having that
annotated gene, you.
Speaker 1: Have the whole genome, every single coding and non coding
region of that genome basically map.
Speaker 2: Yep, and it's publicly available on phytozone.
Speaker 1: Okay. And what was the name of that you said.
Speaker 2: It's yeah, it's called phytosomee.
Speaker 1: The specific line was began with an E.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's called Ellis.
Speaker 1: Ellis Okay, cool, all right, So what are the differences
between fifty eight and fifty four? Are these basically just
these were different experiments where you were shooting that oxogene
in there and seeing where it would end up or
were you was there like control for you were able
to control where it ended up or what.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So the method we use for inserting the gene
is called agrobacterium mediated transformation. And is that No, it's not.
It's kind of more of the classical genetic transformation method.
You use this soil bacteria called agrobacterium. In nature, it's
the causal agent of crown gall disease, and so it
inserts in nature, it will insert tumor inducings which express
all these vital hormones that cause these cancers like gross
called gulls. And so what genetic engineers is they took
out those tumor inducing genes and then you can insert
your genes of interest into that agrobacterium and then it
will insert those genes into plants for you. And that's
a semi random process. Those insertions go in each independent line,
the insertion will be in a different place. So you
have to kind of go through and determine where those
insertions are after you do them, you can't target them.
Speaker 1: And where does it? Does it matter where on the
genome that this gene is inserted from what you can tell?
And how does it affect other things? You know? So,
and first off, how many base pairs are in the chestnut?
How many base pairs long as the chestnut genome?
Speaker 2: It's sixteen megabases.
Speaker 1: Sixteen yes, yep, sixteen million letters. Okay, and so anyway.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, I think it might be billion, sixteen billions
more more cracky because each chromosome is several million holy shit.
Speaker 1: Okay, all right, well I could check that. We could
check that later. But but yeah, so depending I mean,
does how much does location uh of insertion on the
genome matter?
Speaker 2: It matters a lot. And they're actually there's a name
for it, they called position effects, and they can have
a few different differences between them depending on where they're
in asserted. It can have effects on a gene expression level.
So if the insertion goes somewhere that's like a tightly
bound like U chromatin, you're not going to get good
expression because it's like tightly bound ding a. But if
it's somewhere maybe further towards like the ends of the chromosomes,
places where there's more active transcription, you're going to get
higher levels of expression. And you can also have a
diletorious effects if those insertions land in like the middle
of a gene or the cause like deletions of like
parts of the chrome zone. That's something that can happen too,
but that's that's generally not what happens.
Speaker 1: So location matters a bunch, it does, Okay, all right,
by the way, a megabase. Yeah, its million base pairs
so that was was it sixteen megabases long?
Speaker 2: Maybe maybe it's gigabases.
Speaker 1: Gigabaite, Okay, either way, we can I'm looking online. It
says the American chestnut genome is approximately seven hundred and
three million base pairs long based on the assembled sequence
available on fytozone.
Speaker 2: Okay, so that that is the correct number.
Speaker 1: Seven hundred and three megabase. Okay, all right, Well either way,
so so location matters a bunch. So there was obviously
a reason why Darling fifty eight was chosen as opposed
to Darling fifty four. Why was that?
Speaker 2: So with Darling fifty eight, the tDNA insertion dot OXO
insertion was in a space between genes where it wasn't interrupting,
and you have like the native gene sequences in the chromosome.
Speaker 1: So that was the.
Speaker 2: Reason why Darling fifty eight was originally chosen.
Speaker 1: Right, Because you're just you're just slapping this stuff in anywhere.
That's kind of where the lack of control comes in,
I guess, which is a little worrying. And I'm sure
the technology will be improved, but this gene, you know,
you can't really control too much where this this gene
ends up, and if it ends up in the middle
of the instruction manual for another you know of another
gene that's coding for something really important, it renders that
gene useless basically, or it'll just fuck things up or what.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean potentially that's something that could happen, and
I can understand why it sounds a little bit scary,
but in the grand scheme of genetic changes, it's actually
really small, especially when you can compare it to traditional breeding,
or especially hybrid breeding, where you're crossing two different species together.
You can have massive genetic changes where there's entire restructurings
of chromosomes and things of that nature that interrupt thousands
of genes at a time, as opposed to maybe just
like one or two.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a lot more control than because you're only
inserting one gene. Versus if you're hybridizing American chestnuts with
Chinese chestnut, you don't know what the fuck you're going
to get. You're inserting a lot of different genes with
absolutely no control of where they end up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the scale of changes is completely different between the two.
Is much smaller. With the insertion with Agrobacterium.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so, but any anyway, I mean, you guys picked
fifty eight for a reason, and then there was a
mistake where it was actually fifty four, which of course
there's no way to tell until you look at the
you analyze it, right, you look at the DNA and see, oh,
this is actually how do you think that happened?
Speaker 2: Yeah, So, Darling, fifty eight and fifty four were developed
at the same time. They were the transformation as occurred
in the same experiment, and they were regenerated at the
same time, and they were both promising events. We were
developing both of them at the same time because they
both had a single copy of that oxogene. They had
high expression. We measured high levels of mRNA expression, and
they had high levels of blight tolerance when we screened
them with anoculation essay. So we were developing both at
the same time, and at a certain step in the
process you put them into highlight growth chambers to produce
pollen to go on the field and make those crosses
like we were talking about. And so we were doing
crosses with fifty eight and fifty four at the same time,
and so there's kind of two main possibilities of where
this switch happened. It either happened during the propagation stage
like coming out of tissue culture and prop getting in pots,
or it happened during the pollen collection stage where a
tube of fifty four Pallen was mislabeled as fifty eight.
Speaker 1: But the dishes got swapped. It's all happened. Maybe the
petriet dishes got swapped. Maybe the pots. You know, how
are the weed laws in New York. Nobody was blunted
when they were doing this, probably because right, it wasn't
the the you know, the pot. How long has pot
been legal?
Speaker 2: And yeah, I'm not sure the last few years. But
this this switch that happened that this was eight years ago.
Speaker 1: Eight year see, so it couldn't have been. Nobody was
blunted when they were doing it. Was a simple mistake.
I can see myself making a fucking mistake like that.
Speaker 2: It's okay, These types of mistakes happened all the time.
Speaker 1: Happened.
Speaker 2: It's it's not great that it happens, but they definitely
do happen, and everyone's out a story of something like
this happening.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, you know, sometimes the shit hits the
fan and what I don't think this, you know, I
don't think it deserved this because they the way they
made it sound in the press. And of course, when
you're doing science, you should always be one hundred percent
on top of your shit. I'm joking around for any
negative nancies out there in the artists. But but you know,
they made it sound like, oh, it doesn't work, the
gene doesn't work, this transgendic. It's all been a mess.
It just it's it was. It's back to just you know, slamming,
you know, poling from Chinese chestnuts into into egg cells
of American chestnuts and just hoping for the best. Back
to that because we just have to abandon which is
that's shit for brain, that's not you know. So it
turns out it's a simple mistake to condemn those I mean,
that's my opinion, to condemn the whole project and grant
that I'm only hearing your set of the story, but
this just doesn't sound. It's my hopes are still with us,
because I want I want to see chestnuts at some point,
even if they're transgenic. I want to see them, you know,
these towering monolithic beasts that have been able to get
around that ten years, the ten million years that they
missed out on of co evolving with this fungus, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And and this this name switch, it has no
going on all the data that we've collected over the
years on these trees, because even though there was this switch,
it was it's all consistent data. It wasn't like some
was fifty eight and some was fifty four. Luckily everything
is just fifty four, so the data is still completely valid.
And that data shows that these trees have much higher
levels of blight tolerants than wild type American chestnuts, and
also that they're very safe. We did lots of safety
testing showing that they're not harmful to things like insects
like caterpillars or bumblebees or wood frog tadpoles, and so
that's all the stuff that is important to know for
things like government regulators and of course the public too.
The public wants to biologies.
Speaker 1: So you're wrecking So you're not wrecking a fucking ecosystem
any more than it's already been wrecked. I mean, the
whole ecosystem on the East Coast has been fucking wrecked.
I mean, you know, the HDC as I refer to
it has been out there for how long? With five
hundred years? About a little five hundred and twenty, So
you know they've had they got a head start on
the East coast before they could really start ruining the
ecosystems of the West coast. But but you know, yeah,
you want to you want to test, You want to
make sure there's because everything in an ecosystem is connected.
You want to make sure you're not causing a cascade
of shitty effects. How long is the oxogene? How many
base pairs are we talking?
Speaker 2: So the coding region is six hundred and seventy five
base person.
Speaker 1: Oh, it's nothing so small in the non coding region.
Speaker 2: Well, are you talking about the promoter and the terminator? Yes, yeah,
you know, I'm not sure for for Darling, I think
it's probably in the realm of like eight hundred something
like that. So the promoter about the same for the terminator.
Speaker 1: And those would be of course as this as this
tree becomes part of the ecosystem, and you know pollen
has exchanged over generations, those non coding regions will be
subject to change. But the oxogene will be selected for.
Speaker 2: Well, I hope not, because those non coding regions, they're
kind of what regulate the expression of the gene. So
the selection would probably be to keep those intact so
they can keep that gene functioning properly. So if those
ended up getting mutated and the oxygen stopped working, then
those offspring would probably be selected against.
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, okay, I see that. So but either way,
I mean a lot of this just sounds like you
create the pollen, you create the phenotype that's resistant, you
create a couple of them, you put them back into
the ecosystem, and then you know where there's the highest
diversity of remaining chestnut trees, and then you just let
you let natural selection do its work, and anything that
doesn't inherit that oxygene will eventually get blight and you know,
be terminated and just reduced to you know, continuously you know,
sprouting stumps and anything that inherits it will then become
full trees and keep you know, it's going to take
a while, but maybe in five hundred years you could
have this back. But you know, you've got to start somewhere, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And that's and that's a good point too, that
this is it's a starting point. So there will need
to be selection on the front end as well. So
we're doing these crosses with darling and producing lots of offspring,
and we do see variability in the offspring in a
bunch of different things. And that's what you expect at
the beginning of a breeding program, especially when you're using
diverse genotypes for crosses. You see lots of variation. You
see variation in height.
Speaker 1: What kind of work? Yeah, so variation in height. And
then I mean, are you seeing any trees that you know,
when they become a dults that look like because Chinese
chestnuts are just these they're cool, they're great, they're you know,
produce edible fruits, but edible seeds, but they're not that
impressive of a tree. I mean, is it You're not
getting anything that looks like that? Are you?
Speaker 2: No? Well, I, like I said, there is actually a
bit of variability. So some of the offspring are quite
a bit shorter than like the non transient offspring, and
then some are the same. And what you need to
do is select for the offspring that have the good
growth characteristics to carry forward into the breeding program. It's actually,
it's probably actually a pretty common thing in any genetically
engineered plant. There's actually this example of this GMO clover
in New Zealand where they were modifying it to have
increased tannins in the leaves to reduce bloating in the
livestock that eat the clover and in these original trains because.
Speaker 1: That increased tannons would reduce bloating.
Speaker 2: Yes, they increased tannons in the leaf tissue reduces the
bloating and actually the methane production within livestock that eat it.
But their GMO version had a reduction of vigor in
like the early stages it was it didn't grow as
well as a non transgendic but through several generations of
selective crossing and selecting for vigor, they were able to
regain all of that performance of the original line. And
that's typical for any type of project using these molecular
tools to create new events, you need to do hard
selection at the beginning, and that's kind of the step
that we're at now that we're starting to produce lots
of offspring. We're going through a selection stage and getting
picking out the best growers that have the best play
resistance and then using their pollen for the future crosses.
Speaker 1: It's going to be interesting to see because it's kind
of one of these things where you just put it
out there, you do the first steps, and then the
ecosystem kind of does the rest. Like the ecosystem is
gonna select what what's going to thrive best and what won't.
But again, the ecosystem on the East Coast is so wrecked,
it's like, you know, what will be the selection pressures.
They're not going to be the same ones that they
were seven hundred years ago.
Speaker 2: Right, There's definitely gonna be some strong selection going on
in order to get trees that are fit for the environment.
Speaker 1: Okay, so where so when? So tell me let's get
into the melodrama. So what happened? This was discovered you guys,
you know, honed up to it, brought it up, you know, Oops,
we made a mistake, and then what was the blowback?
What happened?
Speaker 2: Yeah, So as soon as we found out this labeling error,
we went and told and we notified the regulatory agencies
right away and let them know that we intended to
correct our paperwork and uh and get that sorted out
prior to deregulation. And there really weren't any issues with
the regulatory agencies. Uh, and we have now submitted that
paperwork revising our original petition. But there were some groups
who decided to use this as a way to attack us,
this labeling issue. And yeah, so there are a few
publications published some negative stories about our stuff that didn't
show us in the best light. But there's always people
looking to jump on you like that when you're working
with this genetically modified technology.
Speaker 1: Right right? That man? So what and regarding that, I mean,
what were what was some of the press that was generated,
because again, the way that I read it was not
it didn't sound like, oh we just you know, both
we make step two things that were both resistant to
chestnut blight. Just a simple error. They made it sound
like the whole project was doomed and had to be abandoned.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's definitely what was being said for a
while there, especially, you know, you'd see these activists organizations
going out and people from that organization giving interviews to
lots of different publications looking to to write about this.
Speaker 1: And.
Speaker 2: You know, there's there's always this these misunderstandings and fear
about the technology, and when something complex like this happens
in error, people don't really understand what that actually means,
and so it could it was easily spun into something
that it wasn't that this was like a complete failure
and we had to start all over when really it
was just an issue of a name change.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm. Yeah, Yeah, we got the the tags got swapped,
but both are still resistant. What was do you think
it was like anti GMO blowback or do you think
it was just other organizations that were working on similar
things with chestnuts? Like what? What? What did what could
you tell? I mean, where where who were all the
who were all the negative Nazis? Not who? But but
what were they saying?
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's other people that work with chestnuts that don't
haven't historically used the molecular breeding tools that we used,
that kind of use that as a way of saying
that their way was still the better way and that
we you know, yeah.
Speaker 1: That seems ridiculous. That seems you're never I mean, it's
going to take forever and you're not going to get
pure American chestnuts by just back cross breeding. But what
was their anti gm O blow too? Though? I mean,
was it some of that?
Speaker 2: Yeah, some of the there were publications like the Washington
Posts actually had an article and you saw members of
the anti GMO organization giving interviews to those people.
Speaker 1: And oh God Jesus Christ, Yeah, that's always a bummer.
I'd love to get my science from from those people.
So what's the what is the what's the future of
this project?
Speaker 2: Then we're continuing on. UH, We're gonna do what we've
been doing, which is use this technology and uh improve
the American chestnut. This darling tree was never supposed to
be a silver bullet. We never claimed it was. We're
still working on new lines that use this same gene,
this oxygene, using new promoters and also in new cell
lines like we discussed before. And we're working on developing
new genes to genes other than oxo to combine with
OXO potentially and UH to create more and more resistant trees.
We're continuously developing biotechnology and American chestnuts so we can
have resistance a chestnut blatant. We're also looking at other
diseases too, like phytothra root rot is a major disease American.
We're looking at genes for that as well.
Speaker 1: The Phytophtha that which is a relative of brown algae
that became parasitic. It's not actually a fungus. Where did
that that species that is problematic for American chestnuts in
the East Coast? Where did that come from? Do you know?
And what species? Is it? A phytostera?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's Phytothra cinemoni.
Speaker 1: Was fucking everywhere. Man, that's in Australia, fucking up boll
of my pines too, And and yeah, anyway, sorry, go ahead,
where to come from?
Speaker 2: I believe it's one of the worst global plant pathogens.
It can infect like thousands of different plant species, so
it's like a really major pathogen. And I think they
believe it was originally brought over on cinnamon trees and
that's where it got its species name from the cinemomi.
And it actually predates chestnut blade introduction. They were having
phytaluther issues prior to chestnut blade.
Speaker 1: But unlike chestnut blighte, it doesn't knock out every tree right.
Speaker 2: It's actually a lot of people consider it worse than
chestnut blake because it attacks the roots and so it
will kill the whole root system and then the tree
can't re sprout like it does when it gets chestnut.
Speaker 1: But does it I mean, is it because chestnut blight
is nearly one hundred percent fatal, right, I mean there
are no American chestnuts that seem resistant to it. Is
that true? Or are there supposedly a couple outliers or what?
Speaker 2: There isn't any validated resistance to chestnut blight, but I
don't think there's anything resistant to fightoth it either. The
thing with phytopha, though, is that it's only in the south,
on the south end of the range. It hasn't come
north north. Yeah, it's not north of like Pennsylvania. So
it's mainly an issue in the south right now, but
as temperatures continue to increase, there's a pretty good chance
it will make its way up here as well.
Speaker 1: Jesus. Okay, so this this idea, how did you guys
catch this this mistake between them, this miss labeling? How
do you guys catch this screw up between fifty Darling
fifty eight and Darling fifty four.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So, like we were talking about before with this
inheritance of the single gene, that's because we have when
you start with the original transformant, there's just the one
gene on one chromosome. But what you can do is
actually cross two trees together that both have the gene,
and then you can end up with offspring that have
a copy of the gene on both chromosomes, so they
would be considered homozygous. And so we were doing a
breeding program for that, and we were screening the offspring
for the inheritance of both of those genes.
Speaker 1: ALM not heterozygous YEP.
Speaker 2: And so we were trying to do PCRs on the
region of the chromosome where Darling fifty eight's ox insertion
is and we were having unsuccessful PCRs, and eventually through
like sequencing, we figured out that it wasn't actually Darling
fifty eight, but it was Darling fifty four.
Speaker 1: When you say unsuccessful PCRs, tell everybody what was going on.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So when you do a PCR, you design little
pieces of DNA to bind to certain places in the
genome to amplify and make lots of copies of DNA.
And so we were trying to do a PCR of
this place in the genome that didn't exist because it
wasn't Darling fifty eight, so it was.
Speaker 1: It was located the oxogene was located in a different
part of the genome. So you were basically putting it
was was it primers? Yes, you were using so the
primers were not matching because they were primers made for
Darling fifty eight not Darling fifty four.
Speaker 2: Yep, exactly, And so.
Speaker 1: That was what made you guys then realize, Okay, we
got Look, but Darling fifty eight and Darling fifty four,
I mean, what are and I think I maybe already
asked you this, but what are some of the differences
between these two different phenotypes that both have the oxogene?
Speaker 2: They're completely indistinguishable. I mean, when if you look at
them next to each other, they look exactly the same.
Speaker 1: Is there is there any difference in Bleich resistance?
Speaker 2: No, they're functionally equivalent. And also gene expression is almost
exactly the same to the level of that oxoexpression.
Speaker 1: Jesus. So this really, it really isn't that big of
a deal. It sounds like, I mean, it is for
a fucking study, that's a huge fuck up. But in
the long game, in terms of restoring an ecosystem, these
are both would you guys, would Darling fifty four ever
be released or was that just kind of a backup
that is not planning to be released in the first place.
Speaker 2: I mean it could have potentially been released, but we
were focusing more on Darling fifty eight because you kind
of need to just like choot, we have limited operations
so to like split the breeding between two different lines,
which is result in like fewer numbers of one or
the other. So we were just focusing on fifty eight
or what we thought was fifty eight for all those years.
But yeah, the yeah, I'm sorry train of thought.
Speaker 1: That's okay, Well this is a casual conversation anyway, don't
worry about it.
Speaker 2: But I'm sorry, I just remembered. So it wasn't as
if we weren't testing the offspring with PCRs and stuff
the whole time. The problem was eight years ago and
have that annotated genome like we have now, like we
were talking about, that is something that came years after
this labeling mistake happened, So we didn't actually have the
resources to identify in the genome where these inserts were.
So that was part of the issue early on, is
that we didn't have the fully annotated genome at that point.
Speaker 1: So that and that's why this was that's why this
wasn't caught before. Right, Well, I mean I still so
what do you think is there a point in time
at which this you know, OXO containing phenotypes of American
chestnut trees, of pure American chestnut trees, not hybridized ones
where parts of the Chinese chestnut are just shotgun throughout
the genome. Is there a point in time at which
American chestnuts with blight resistance might be available to the public.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what we're working towards right now now. Because
they're genetically engineered, they're highly regulated by the US Biotechnology
Regulatory Service, so that's the USDA, the EPA, and the FDA,
and so we have to go through a regulatory process
basically demonstrating that the trees are safe, and then once
they're given approval, then we can begin distributing distributing them
to the public.
Speaker 1: The companies that like when Monsanto does the round up
ready crops and all the shit that they put I mean,
they have to do the same thing, right or do they?
They probably lobby. They're a huge organization, so they probably
lobby to get you know, las you know, to have
some of this stuff more lax with them, to get
some of these regulations lacks, or to speed things up.
Speaker 2: Well, actually they benefit from having really strong regulations because
they can afford to go through that process. They can
hire lawyers and of scientists to generate data to go
through this process, whereas smaller guys, say small university labs
or something, don't have the resources to fund all the
studies and the lawyers to put their products through this
regulatory process. So people like Monsanto actually benefit from having
really strong regulation, whereas the little guys are the ones
that are pushed out of the market because I can't
afford to do it.
Speaker 1: I don't see it. How do they benefit though.
Speaker 2: Because it reduces their competition because there are so that
they can They can actually afford to go through that
regulatory process, but they're the only ones who can. So
there's little.
Speaker 1: Yeah hoops that they can jump through, but no one
else can, right, So that's why they get a monopoly.
The fucking round up readything is so insane, like the
fact that they spray round up on crops, that's fucking insane,
just even if you're feeding it the livestock. That's just nuts,
you know, And then it's bad for people like me
to want to you know, roundup gets all the bad
press because it's you know, given everybody cancer because they're
eating it, versus I just want to use it to
get rid of some fucking bermuda grass in my yard
and I can't. Now I'm getting Now I'm getting mean
comments from these permaculture wackos. No offense to the ideology
of permaculture. It's just the association that I've noticed you
just you tend to meet, you get like a fifty
to fifty Tell me someone who's in the permaculture, it's
a fifty to fifty chance I might not be able
to tolerate being around them for more than ten minutes.
That okay, But anyway, sorry, So the the regulations, I mean,
let's say I'm a corporates lease right, and I've got
some sort of I've got some sort of ulterior motive
with this. I want to make money off of it.
I'm approaching you guys saying, hey, I've got this great idea.
We can you know a way that we can generate
so much revenue and corner of the market using this
technology you guys invented. Is what the chances of that happening?
Am I going to be successful or are you guys?
Is there is there good intention, good solid work that's
going to prevent the corruption of this work. You guys
have done.
Speaker 2: Well with the distribution of these trees. We want it
to be as open as possible so that anyone who
wants to grow these trees are able to. So the
way you do that is with things like non exclusive
licenses without patents, and so it's easier for people to
grow these trees and move them around and basically do
whatever they want with them, versus having, you know, a patented,
non propagatable piece of you know, plant material that that
only gets in the way of restoration.
Speaker 1: So this will be non patented. Have you guys been
approached by any money hungry villains out there. I'm not
asking you to name names. I'm just wondering if any
dirt bag, you know, corporate the you know what I mean,
corporate interests have approached you and tried to, you know,
tempt you. Has that happened.
Speaker 2: I don't think so. But I mean, even if that
were to happen, I mean, it seems like it would
be something better than what they're already doing. Right If
a corporation wants to get behind something to restore the
American trusts, not that that probably wouldn't be the worst
thing in the world.
Speaker 1: Well, it's not with the intention of putting money behind.
It's just there's a cost. And then when you privatize something,
you always seem to lose efficacy for the sake of
because the main motive is not it's no longer being
you know, being you know, the purpose now becomes making
money as opposed to actually achieving the goal in the
first place, you know, and if you are achieving the goal,
it's only as a stepping stone to make more money
and please shareholders, et cetera. Which is kind of like
why it's so ridiculous when people talk about, you know, well,
private sector it's the post to the government. Well, yeah,
the government can be tainted and fucked up and inefficient too.
The private sector almost certainly is looking like the power company.
Like you know, in Texas, there's like ten different sleezebag
companies that are all going to equally rob you, well
not equally. Some definitely shake you down more than others,
you know, for the purges of electricity versus if it's
like a public utility. Yeah, there might be problems, but
privatizing is sometimes the worst thing you can you know,
it's all this this nineteen eighties Reaganomics garbage. But I
was just curious because it seems like that would be Okay,
pardon it. We hit a technical difficulty. I'll put a
commercial break in there. Got the fucking commercials on this
podcast have gotten horrible. It used to do this auto
select thing to put the commercials in, and they would
put like nine commercial breaks, and then now I just
fucking go in there. Have to put them in myself,
because it's you know, you'll be listening to a podcast
on American chestnuts and all of a sudden you get
this just crass, horrific. Hey wait, come come out to
Jumbu Casino. Just fills me with fucking hate. Anybody talks
to me like that, I just Jesus Christ. Anyway, Okay,
so we were we were just talking about you know,
possible corruption of of uh you know, uh market opportunities
for for marketing industry. But but again, there's going to
be non patented. This is just open source basically, it's
like a like an open source software.
Speaker 2: Yeah, essentially, Yeah, because we wanted a few barriers in
the way of restoration as possible, and if rustoration is
our goal, it's definitely not to make a bunch of
money to be able to get these threatened trees back
on the forests.
Speaker 1: And so how did you guys get funding for this?
Speaker 2: By the way, I guess there's a variety of different sources.
Some came from the State of New York.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: Some from the New York chapter of the American Chess Foundation,
which is basically our biggest partner, a biggest supporter. For
a few years, we were funded by the Templeton World
Charity Foundation. They actually funded us for three years, which
was a huge help, really allowed us to grow and
advanced as a project. And recently we actually partnered with
this company called American Castania, which is a small B
corporation which is a public interest corporation startup. It's just
like a few guys and they're starting to plant some
orchards with our trees for future distribution.
Speaker 1: God, that seems so great, man. I don't know, I
would love to see it. I'd love to see it,
you know. Comit wasn't there some project on abandoned coal
mining sites like pit mines that got filled in in
Appalachia where they were going to restore them. They were
going to because to plant these things you would need
you know, they need sun. They're not they're kind of
shade intolerant. I guess maybe when not when they're young,
but certainly when they get older, so you'd need open canopies.
Was there, and you know, abandoned coal mining operations are
a great spot to do it. Was there something about
that going on from what you know?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I remember there was ideas to plant on coal
reclamation sites. That was one of the ideas. There's other
programs I've been discussed, such as converting foul farmland and
stuff like that. There's quite a bit of that on
the East Coast that was formerly forests that was converted
into agriculture, you know, like one hundred and two hundred
years ago and has kind of just been abandoned and
is now not really productive land. Those would be good
places to plant them as well.
Speaker 1: You're going to have some competition from shipbag developers though,
because they want to put you know, ugly tracked housing
and you know, big box stores in those all at
abandoned farmland. That's the big thing that the United States
is doing these days is that you see what is
what's the cul de sac neighborhood Seene like around seat.
What are the suburbs of Syracuse like.
Speaker 2: Pretty typical, I guess, I mean equally just.
Speaker 1: Good old standard American bleak like you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's lots of trees though, So that's nice.
Speaker 1: That is cool. That is cool, Yeah, because we don't
you know, it's it's a lot of lawns in Texas,
like in the I thirty five corridor. Those are some
of the bleakst fucking suburbs I've seen not a lot
of trees.
Speaker 2: So we get lots of uh forestation around here from
all the rain that we got.
Speaker 1: Did you have you guys sourced when you were looking
for phenotypes of of Castania and tile, were you guys
sourcing any trees from out west? Because there's a number
of of trees that got planted, you know, in western
North America where the blight is not as good at surviving,
probably due to the aridity. Were you guys sourcing any
phenotypes from out there they got planted before the blight
you know, took hold in nineteen ten or whenever it was.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think we did actually get a couple from
out there. There is this one now the names it's
like a light cemetery or something like that. There's a tree.
I think it's either Oregon or Washington.
Speaker 1: Washington, Tumbwater, Washington. Yeah, there's two beasts there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I think we got a clone from that,
and that's part of our orchard. We have thousands of
different genotypes from all across the range. We have southern trees,
we have northern trees, stuff in the middle. You know,
we tried as much diversity as possible.
Speaker 1: There was a I remember seeing a massive fucking American
chestnut that I guess was planted in the late eighteen
hundreds and the Klamath River in Hamburg, California, and I
talked to the lady who lived there, so this kind
of the fucking shack looks like it belongs to Appalachia.
It's like this old house, and she's you know, I
went and talked to him, like, is that a fuck
that looks like an American chestnut. She's like, yeah, it
was planted by a miner in eighteen fifty two that
came out here from West Virginia. And I was like,
that's a fucking one hundred and sixty year old American
chest not holy shit, But it was only one, so
there wasn't the you know, no good seed, but they
fuck it was a beautiful I got a photo of it. Yeah,
I was in Hamburg looking for Baker cypress trees. There's
a cool grove that I guess burned wonderful fucking Hespero
ciprus species.
Speaker 2: I'd love to get out there. I know there's this
one farm that's near LA called Skyline Chestnuts, and they've
got quite a few American chestnuts and American chestnut hybrids
that are like fully mature and producing notes. I'd love
to see those in person.
Speaker 1: What's the biggest American chestnut that you've seen or that
you know of on the East Coast.
Speaker 2: Well, the one that I know of is the biggest
is in Maine. It's like one hundred and fifteen feet tall.
Speaker 1: I think Jesus, and it didn't How did it not
get black?
Speaker 2: It must have grown really fast and hassmissed it so far.
But if I recall correctly, I think I heard that
people have found some lesions on it, so it might
not be there too much longer. But I myself, I've
found a few large surviving American chestnuts in the Syracuse area.
I actually found one that was probably around eighty or
ninety feet tall, and I actually took cuttings from that
and grafted it into our orchard, and you've done crosses
with it.
Speaker 1: When you're grafting, you have to make sure that that
ring of vascular cambia meets up perfectly or what.
Speaker 2: In theory. Yeah, I understand that's how it works, but
I'm I just do cleft grafts. If you're familiar with that,
it's basically the simplest form of grafting, and that seems
to work pretty well. I've gotten a few successful grass
using that type.
Speaker 1: I've only ever grafted cacti before, and it's easier because
they've got cat I have cortical bundles, unlike I think
every other family of plants made. There's probably a couple
other families that have cortical bundles, but they've got vascular
tissue in the cortex basically.
Speaker 2: So I think that's one of the great ways of
preserving genetic diversity, because there's still like millions of trees
out there that are just like these little stump sprouts
that are stuck under the canopy and so they can't flower.
If you locate those you can go and take cuttings
from lows and graft them into orchards that get good sun,
and then you can do crosses with those with those
trees that otherwise would never be able to make nuts.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you're preserving genetic diversity. But still if that
stem I mean, you can graft an American onto a Chinese,
I presume, but the American will still get blight, at
least that branch will.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's correct. So what you're doing is you're capturing
its genetics in the offspring.
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, but still the Yeah, the American tree,
the American, that American branch will still get blight, but
but the whole tree that it's a part of will
be fine. But still, I mean a branch, there's a
lot less service area for blight the colonies compared to
a whole giant tree trunk.
Speaker 2: So yeah, and most of them it is sorry.
Speaker 1: Blight germinates, I mean, the spores germinate on the kind
of like the opening for them where they get in
is where the bark is splitting as the tree grows.
Speaker 2: Right, yep, that's right. And so you see kinkers form
on the graft unions pretty often.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so right on the graft Yeah, okay.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've done quite a bit of grafting over the years,
and a lot of it takes and grows for a
couple of years, and then usually within like three or
four years, it dies from the blight. We have some
transgenic trees that I use as root sock, and I've
been able to to keep more alive longer using those
as the roots suck than just using non transgenic trees,
and I've had the best success with that, and some
of our biggest trees are actually from grass.
Speaker 1: So what happens to the transgenic trees when they get blight?
Speaker 2: Yeah, they get these gnarly looking cankers on them. They
it kind of you could describe it as like a blocky,
quirky kind of texture, and it gets swollen versus like
a normal wild type canker. They actually look like they're
sinking in. And what the oxod does is it slows
the blight down enough that the trees' natural defenses can
kick in and compartmentalize up blight infection so the tree
can keep growing.
Speaker 1: So they still get infected and they'll get a canker,
but the canker swells up instead of sinking in and
then what happened you know, a year down the line,
when the tree has sealed it off and recovered it.
Speaker 2: Uh, it just continues to grow and it just a scar.
It does have a scar, yeah, it does. It gets
a bit of a gnarly texture to it. Have you
ever heard of the phenomenon of kruddy bark before?
Speaker 1: No cruddy bark?
Speaker 2: Yeah, So it's kind of this thing that was discovered
in American chestnuts where these kinkers get this like really
bizarre texture and uh, and but the trees are able
to survive, and they think it's some kind of infection
going on of the fungus. The fungus is getting infected
either with another fungus or maybe a virus, and it
seems to spread. But the tree it gets like this
really nasty looking bark on the tree that's kind of
like a qirky, blocky texture. But the tree is able
to grow. And that's on non trans trees where that occurs,
But on these tracks genic trees it looks really similar
to that. It gets this like kind of this coirky,
gnarly texture where the canker is and that allows the
tree to survive.
Speaker 1: And so in Chinese chestnuts, I mean, is it known
how the Chinese chestnuts resist the black because my how
I presume this how chryphenectria got so pathogenic and so
deadly was a series of baby steps. You know, ten
million years ago the ancestor of chryphenectria or whatever lineage
you know, if you go far ten million years back
in that lineage, whenever this thing evolved or first interacted
with the genus castania, you know, it probably wasn't that bad.
But then then the genus I assume it's like an
evolutionary arms race in other words, like the Chinese chestnuts
get some resistance, all the ones that don't have it
get culled out by the fungus. Now the fungus has
to up its you know, enzymes to break down more
chestnut tissue and get around this compartmentalization whatever. Now that
then the Chinese. Now it's the Chinese, you know, just
like the zigzag back and forth ping pong of you know,
upping defenses versus upping pathogenicity. How does the Chinese chestnut
resist resist chryphenectria?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right, And you described me pretty pretty well.
That co evolutionary process. One one theory is called the
red Queen theory, which is that you have to run
as fast as you can just to stay in place.
And there's there's gene gene for gene interactions, so you know,
the the tree will evolve a gene for resistance to
the blight, the blight will evolve a gene for resistance
to that, and that just keeps going on and on forever.
And so there's thousands of genes that are likely involved
in blight resistance. In Chinese chestnut, they've found a disease
resistant losai on almost all of the chromosomes in Chinese chestnut,
So there's so election going on on all of those
chromosomes for resistance. So they've got different mechanisms. One is
the oxalic acid degradation. They have a multi step pathway
for that which is hypothesized, it hasn't actually been fully
elucidated yet. And then they have different types of tannins
they use. They have a different enzyme inhibiting proteins that
they express, and all that adds up to them compartmentalizing
the fungus. They wall off the fungus and hold it
in place and then basically outgrow the fungus.
Speaker 1: So they're just they're throwing a ton of shit at it. Basically, yes,
and this was again the result of millions of years
of coevolution and ecosystem and Chryfhenectara parasitica is an invasive fungus,
which is another point to make. That's another thing I
always hear about. Again, it's a fifty to fifty chance
with the permaculture people, not all hashtag not all permaculture people,
but they're always not always fifty to fifty percent of
the time. I feel like they're just denying invasion biology,
which is easy to do when you don't understand it.
I used to be like that fifteen years ago. I
get it, but it's this is this is invasive. What
invasive means. It's not going back to some mythical period
and time where you know everything was pure, or any
of these goofy fucking you know, straw man arguments people make.
It's about ecological function and coevolution in an ecosystem. And
when you when you cross that ocean that's been separating
North American ecosystem from the Asian ecosystem, and you're basically
eradicating those ten million years of coevolution, and now you've
got this pathogen that's a mild pain in the ass,
you know, pragmatically speaking for the tree that it's co
evolved with, and now it's this fucking nightmare that just
basically causes an extinction. American justnut would be extinct one
day were it not for hybridizing programs, and wow, that
it's not even it would still be extinct. It's not
a pure American or not for this transgenic process, it
would be extinct. There's no natural resistance, there's no way
around it. It would be gone. Give another century or two,
the stump sprouts run out of juice, they're no longer functional.
Boom that that tree is gone. It only exists and
hopefully fossil record somewhere.
Speaker 2: Right And even though it's not like extinct right now,
it's functionally extinct. It's completely lost its place in the
ecosystem and it's not feeding the ecosystem the way it
used to, and it's not reproducing and replacing itself.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's one of those fucking blocks that a huge
block has been taken out of that Jenga tower that
is the North American East Coast ecosystem, and it's teetering.
So that's why I applauded the work that you guys
are doing. And I can't imagine why anybody would be
against it. I certainly understand it, you know, exercising caution,
but I don't understand why anybody would just would be
against it, are quick to condemn it, or you know,
it's the best we can do. We're affecting as a species,
we're affecting life on earth, no matter what, we might
as well try to do it in a positive fashion.
You know, well studied, et cetera. What made you? What
made you want to take this up? What got you
interested in chestnuts? Because you're not from You didn't grow
up in the native range of these things, did you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. I'm actually originally from North Dakota, and
when I was in undergrad at the University of North Dakota,
I worked on transgenic poplars. Poplars are actually another one
of my things I'm really interested in, which is funny
to some people. A lot of people think they're just weeds,
but I'm really into poplars. But anyway, I was working
on transgenic popular and undergrad and I was looking at
what I wanted to do for grad school, and I
learned about the American Trust and how they're using this technology,
this these molecular biology tools to have like really positive change.
You know. This is such a great example of what
the technology can be used for for good, and that
really appealed to me, you know, And so I came
out here to Syracuse to work on a new line
of chestnut that actually uses a promoter from Poplar. That
was actually my master's degree project, and I'm actually still
working on that project now, this new line of American
chestnut that uses the same oxogene, but it uses a
promoter from Poplar to regulate it.
Speaker 1: When you say promoter and terminator, can you explain to
everybody what those are? Basically, they're just what begin and
and a gene region yep.
Speaker 2: So, a promoter is a non coding region of DNA
that regulates how a gene's expressed. It regulates where it's
expressed in plant, so in the leaves or the stem
or the roots it expressed. It determines when it's expressed,
whether it's expressed all the time or only under certain conditions,
and it controls how highly it's expressed, So if it
expresses a lot of gene product or if maybe just
a moderate or a low amount.
Speaker 1: Okay, So yeah, it's basically the start and stop. It's
a non coded region, but they're still really important for
how the gene is expressed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like a genetic switch. So it's like the
genetic switch that controls how a gene's expressed.
Speaker 1: Okay, So okay, Well, changing the subject briefly from DNA
to ecological function. How does where does so? Cryphenectria obviously
can exploit other food sources. It's not a specifist for
castanas because it's got to be hiding out somewhere in
the ecosystem since all of the all the chestnut are
basically gone except for stump sprouts. Where does it? Where
does it hide out?
Speaker 2: Yeah? So it's also a saffar troph. It can consume
dead wood, and it also has a host range that
goes beyond just chessnut. It can actually also go on
several different oak species and a few different maples I believe,
But yeah, it it can host on most of the
oak species, and it can actually be an opportunistic pathogen
on some of them. Like the oglethorpe oak and the
scarlet oak. It can be pretty pathogenic.
Speaker 1: On what what species of quircus are those? Do you
know of him?
Speaker 2: Uh? Yeah, I think that's Quirkus orgle oglethal bit and
I believe. And this scarlet oak escapes me. I'm not
sure what.
Speaker 1: One of the prime reasons for not naming plants after
people is just that how fucking ridiculous some of these
these names are when you try to latinize them and
put them as a species epithet. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it can be pretty silly when someone inserts the name.
Speaker 1: For its.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: Okay, so this thing's hiding out. I mean it's a
sapartrough too. So this is like a wonderfungus.
Speaker 2: Fuck yeah, it's not going anywhere. It's here for good.
It's the only way to get around is to create
trees that are resistant to it.
Speaker 1: What was when it because there was a virus that
was taking the fungus back or putting a hold on it, right,
I mean the fungus has to have has to have
some ecological checks and balances back home too. Do you
know about any of those?
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's this type of micovirus that's called hypovirus and
it can get into the fungus and decrease the fungus's pathogenicity.
And this was originally discovered in Europe. They also have
blight over there, and they discovered a few decades ago
that there were some kinkers that were healing on their trees,
and they discovered that there were these viruses in them
that were causing the blight to kind of get turned around.
But in the US they tried to apply that in
the US and it didn't work as well. And the
reason for that is in Europe there was very limited
genetic diversity in their blight fungus, and so the virus
is very easy to spread around. But in the United
States there's a ton of genetic diversity in the blight.
There was probably several different introductions, and so these different
blight strains are not compatible and so the virus doesn't
spread between them.
Speaker 1: And so this fungus was brought over on other chestnut trees,
right on Chinese and Japanese chestnuts or.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was originally brought over on Japanese chestnuts.
Speaker 1: Wow. Fuck, that's man, that's brutal. So and in Europe
the species is Castania sativa. It's different chestnut species too.
Speaker 2: Yes, yep. And it's also a susceptible species.
Speaker 1: Is it slightly more resistant then tata?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is slightly more, but not that much. Still susceptible,
so it gets killed by it.
Speaker 1: Well, how do you think, I mean, when these species
diverge from the same common ancestor, how did one end
up in Asia and one end up in the eastern
North America? Just probably because the higher latitudes were warmer,
and that was probably because they weren't going across the ocean.
There were probably ranges that extended up into the Arctic
when it was a lot warmer up there, and then
would make their way down, you know, shorter distance at
the top of the globe versus at the lower latitudes.
I mean, is that how it's surmised because there's a
lot of disjuncts between eastern North America and Asia.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Millions of years ago, all the continents were connected
in the northern hemisphere, and so the chesshunt was able
to spread from its origin in Asia around to North
America and into Europe before they were eventually separated by
plate tech tonics.
Speaker 1: I mean, that was much longer though, that wasn't just
ten or twenty million years ago, That was a lot
much longer period of time, right, Or am I wrong?
Speaker 2: No? I believe you're right.
Speaker 1: But these things because these things separated not that long ago,
only ten or twelve million years ago according to the
molecular clock est mints. So I mean, but either way,
it's still a shorter distance if you're going across bodies
of water, migratory paths, you know, between birds or among
birds are going to be again shorter at the top
of the ball the globe than at the lower latitudes,
you know. So I assume that's what it was. It
was just the Arctic was warmer, and because there's a
lot of fucking disjunctions, whereas you know, humid and the
climates of eastern North America and Asia are similar enough
in humidity and temperature, et cetera. But in western North America,
had any of those species been there, you know, in
the western North America you've got these orogenes, these mountains uplifting,
creating rain shadows, whole western part of the continents drying out,
and so a lot of stuff was probably there, but
one extinct.
Speaker 2: That's exactly right. They've found chestnut fossils in like the
Rocky Mountains and on the West coast, and chestnut used
to be all across North America. But when the mountain
ranges on the West coast were raised up, like you said,
and tried out the middle of the continent, that's when
most of those chestnuts were pushed to the East coast.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I guess the only place they survived was the
East coast because it was warmer. Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah,
they used to be fucking Don redwoods. I mean even
like twelve million years ago. I've found huge fossilized permenized
some with still fucking wood fibers in them, like the
really like partially permenialized wood fibers in southeastern Oregon northwestern Nevada,
and the layer of basalt above them is like twelve
million years old. I think these these you know, dispetrified
wood was estimated to be fourteen million years old. I
looked at the layer of rock that it isn't entombed
in white volcanic ash. But that's crazy.
Speaker 2: The comparison to the Don redwood as far as the
migration goes, because you can find Don redwood across you know,
North America and Asia and Europe the same way the
chestnuts were because it was that area was all connected.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, similar and similar, similar climate, similar humidity
requirements between medisaquoia and American chestnut. Medisaquoia doesn't do well
in a dry climate. I mean, even if it's growing
in a fucking river, it's there's still just the that
dry summer era just pulls moisture out of it too quick.
But yeah, that's that's true. I didn't even think of
that because that's where medisaquoia is still in existence today.
Is is eastern China, right. I think there's like five
thousand trees left. God, I would love to go there.
Do you know anyone who's seen Medisaicoia in the wild.
There's far more in cultivation than there are in left
and habitat.
Speaker 2: I don't. That would be a really cool trip, though.
I've always wanted to go to China for a botanical
adventure because they got all the cool stuff over there.
Speaker 1: Yeah I have. I haven't even touched Asia yet, man,
except like the fucking area right around the Hong Kong airport.
I would love to go. I'm kind of saving it
till I can start digesting it all at once, and
I want to just dip my feet in and become
familiar with these certain families and lineages and shit, and
then leave and not come back for three years.
Speaker 2: You know. Yeah, I remember when I was taking undergrad
body course and you're Washington documentary of the sky and
mountains in China, and he's just going like down the list,
like every flowering plant family was represented on this hillside.
You know, he's going basically down the list and everything
was there because you know that that's the center of
radiation for all angiosprings.
Speaker 1: Really my recollection, Wow, Jesus God, damn. Yeah, man, I
gotta get over there. And plus, it seems like China
actually funds a lot of science, at least compared to
the United States.
Speaker 2: You know, yeah they do. They've got really great forestry programs.
Speaker 1: Fucking Ronald Reagan quote in the eighties like we're not
here to subsidize intellectual curiosity. And so fifty years later,
you got a fucking population that's, you know, getting dumber
by the with every passing year. Well I guess that.
I guess that concludes. I mean, I got time left,
but I don't.
Speaker 2: Talk about some newer stuff we've been working on.
Speaker 1: Sure, sure, Yeah, what's what's been going on?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I mentioned briefly this, uh, this new line
using the palslar promoter. We're pretty excited about it because
this oxogene, it is highly regulated by that promoter where
it's kept turned off most of the time. It's called
an inducible promoter. And so basically what that promoter does
is it keeps expression turned off until the trees are
actually infected with the blight fungus, and then the gene
gets turned on and then it can mount a defense.
And so what that does is it preserves resources of
the tree that would otherwise be going to the oxode
expression to be used for other stuff like growth.
Speaker 1: And so instead of so, how does the oxygen work
in It produces an enzyme that breaks down oxalic acid.
Speaker 2: Yep, So it produces this enzyme. It's a cell wall
embedded enzyme. And yeah, it breaks down that acid into
hydrogen peroxide and CO two and.
Speaker 1: So if but it's not in this case with this
new promoter, it's not producing that enzyme unless unless there's
an actual infection, Unless an infection is.
Speaker 2: Detected, right, it's induced by physical damage or by pathogen infection.
That when a pathogen infects a plant, it releases all
kinds of chemicals into the plant tissue and those chemicals
will actually trigger the promoter to start producing expression.
Speaker 1: The oxidale like acid that's produced by chryphenectria. What what
does that's a byproduct of the enzyme that the fungus produces.
What can we get into that? What's going on there?
Speaker 2: Yeah, So oxalic acid is actually produced from oxalo acetate,
which is a normal metabolic compound that's produced like during
cellular respiration. And there's this pathway that ends with it's
called oxaloacetate and hydrolyse and it basically converts that oxalo
acetate into oxalic acid. And so that mechanism is really
well understood because of that high overhelence research that we
talked about.
Speaker 1: And this is we're talking about what cellular respiration of
the fungus or what are we talking about here?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so just during normal like metabolism, you know, producing
ATP in the citric acid cycle, oxal acid is.
Speaker 1: Just like the of the fungus you're talking about. In
the fungus, we got to specify that for anybody listening
to this. So this is occurring in the fungus.
Speaker 2: Yes, the fungus is drawing its own resources and creating
the acid. And then the acid gets secreted out of
the fungus into the tissue of the plant and that
kills the tissue of the plant. And then the fungus
will release this other enzyme called oxalate decarboxylates and it
breaks down the acid and then the funst grows into
that dead tissue and consumes it.
Speaker 1: Wow, so it's not really a byproduct. I mean it
is initially oxalic acid is a byproduct of just cellular
respiration in the fungus, but then it serves the fungus
by killing the tissue first and then allowing other enzymes
to move into the tree tissue.
Speaker 2: Yep, that's right. And the acid does a few things.
It kind of breaks apart the cell walls of the
tree tissue and it makes it more digestible, and then
it secreased digestive enzymes into that dead tissue to break
it down more before the fungus consumes it.
Speaker 1: And would those digestive enzymes by the fungus not be
able to break down the tree tissue. If this oxalic
acid hadn't been there first.
Speaker 2: They're greatly reduced. The advocacy of everything else is reduced
without the oxalic acid. It's one of the main components.
They've actually taken fungus, normal healthy fungus, and they've disrupted
the gene that makes oxalic acid and then infected trees
with that mutant fungus, and the pathogenicity is greatly reduced.
So everything kind of revolves around that oxalic acid.
Speaker 1: We'll talk would there be a way using like gene
drive technology to create oxalic acid impotent strains of fungus
and then throw that into the the fungus itself, like
throw that into the population. I mean, I'm not saying
we should do this, but what is that theoretical is like?
Is that is that Another approach is like basically what
they do with mosquitoes. They create these bunk you know,
shooting blanks mosquitoes. You know, that produced an entirely male
population of mosquitos, and then it's slowly over time, you
can have to keep putting it out there, these dud mosquitos,
but eventually you reduce the mosquito population by like ninety
six percent using gene drive.
Speaker 2: The main issue there would just be the sexual incompatibility
between the strains like we were talking about before. But
there there is actually a lab right now that's working
on genetically engineering the fungus and what they're doing is
creating what was called the super donor, And what they're
doing is knocking out genes within the fungus that creates
those barriers for the different strains. So basically that strain
is able to spread virus between all strains.
Speaker 1: Wow shit, Okay, well that's good, is there? What would
be the the thing about repercussions? Like back in the
ecosystem in Asia where this fungus is native, what would
be the repercussions of knocking out this fungus? Say it
could happen of just the you know, we were trying
to knock out the fungus in the American ecosystem and
then you end up you know, the fund exploit. It's
so it works so well that the fungus now becomes
extinct in Asia. What would be that you could think
of what would be a potential repercussion of that now
that you remove this pathogen, Like what other function is
there a beneficial function to other organisms that this fungus
produces in the ecosystem of Asia where it's native Eastern Asia.
Speaker 2: That's a really interesting question and I don't know the answer,
but I do know that this fungus, they weren't even
aware that this fungus was a thing until it was
brought to America and it began infecting the American chestnut trees.
They later then went back to China and found it
in the wild and like, oh, yeah, it is in
the wild here. So it's so little of a problem
there that they weren't even aware of it until it
made the jump onto American chess.
Speaker 1: See, there was no fungal diversity survey in the early
twentieth century in Asia. That's the problem. You know, if
you had had if you had had just regular Joe's
regular quote citizen scientists out there studying fungi in Asia
in the early twentieth century, this all could have been prevented,
right right.
Speaker 2: And the original infected trees that they think were brought
over in the eighteen seventies, and that was before the
germ theory was even widely accepted, so they really had
no idea what they were doing.
Speaker 1: At that point, God as a species were such babies,
like we're so young, like we haven't no clue what's
going on. We're so oblivious to so many parts of
this living world that we're a part of, you know,
it's wild. And then you've got idiots like fucking Reagan saying, well,
we're out here to fund intellectual curiosity. Wow, you're gonna get.
That's what you're gonna get. You're gonna get, You're gonna
get this and more shit every I mean, it's safe
to say basically every tree pathogen in North America except
for pine beetles is an invasive species that didn't exist
in anywhere in the North American continent until it was
brought over the last one hundred two hundred years. Right right, yep,
What are some other bad t I mean, do you
have any other do you have any interest in other
tree pathogens?
Speaker 2: Yes, So one of the things that we're starting to
work on now is beech trees. So beach has a
couple of pathogens. The older one that's been around for
a while is beach park disease. But there's actually a
new one that's come out that's even worse and it's
called beach leaf disease, and it's caused by a limatode
and possibly complexes with other fungi or something like that,
but it's primarily caused by nematode. And we're doing some
of the earliest research on this disease, and we're beginning
to do the beginning steps of tissue culture with beach
and we could potentially apply the techniques that we've developed
in American chests not to beach as well to hopefully
address issues like the speechleief disease.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, that's what's going on, is like, you know,
people are just swapping parts of ecosystems from one to
another that have been separated for dozens of millions of years,
and no shit, you know, not surprisingly things go haywire.
Not every non native is an invasive species, but every
invasive species is a non native primarily from another continent.
There's a couple exceptions. Someone sent me an email about
a loop and species from the West coast of North
America that's causing you know, that's fucking with a loop
and species in Maine. And then there's a you know, Rabinia,
which is a you know, invasive legume tree that can
become a little invasive out west, you know, especially because
it can you know, clone it sends up runners, it
sends up you know, cloned stems, so it basically forms
a colony. But but it's these continental ecosystems when you
start fucking around, you know, it's like it's like it's
like taking a piece from a nineteen eighty nine Honda
prelude and trying to put it in a in a
fucking buick, you know, and being amazed when the trans
transmission blows up. So it just it blows my mind.
I mean, it's and all of these were presumably unintentional.
I mean, white pine blister rust, same thing that's from
Germany where you know where that's from.
Speaker 2: I don't remember where that one's from. That sounds right
that I think it was originally imported on nursery stock
from Europe.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's got that alternate host to that it
needs because it's life cycle. It's on you know, members
of rose ci No ribies.
Speaker 2: Yes, ribies, that's correct.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Are there there's ribies in New York Native ribies,
aren't there?
Speaker 2: Yes?
Speaker 1: Jesus, yeah, man.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there was there was a an eradication program in
the early twentieth century when they discovered that that was
the intermediate host of the white pine blister us and
they had bounties on them, and so people were out
destroying those on the ecosystem, but there is just too
many and eventually they gave.
Speaker 1: Up destroying ribies. Yeah, fucking idiot, They're going to take
out this other native plant like fucking morons. What do
you think again? You know, the field of ecology is
so young, the whole you know, it's just it's crazy.
You have such repercussions. It's like removing a predator from
an ecosystem and now the fucking deer population goes goes
up and they end up eating, nibbling everything down and
then getting deer of course don't know how to regulate
their own population those species really does humans included. I'm
not advocating anything. I'm just saying we should be encouraging,
let you know, reduced population. But that's all I'm saying.
Speaker 2: But anyway, there's should be less deer geh and.
Speaker 1: The deer get bit Well, that's like the Kaibab plateau.
The population gets too big and the whole population crashes
and now they're suffering among all the deer. They're starving
and getting ridden with disease, and it's all because of people.
Speaker 2: People. It seems to be a problem across the entire country.
Everywhere I hear there's these deer issues. There's definitely issues
here on the East coast, but I know there's issues
on the West coast, and I know they're taking out
the aspen forests. Like I'm sure you've heard of Pando before.
Pando's having a bad having issues because it can't regenerate
because the deer comes in and they eat all the
root suckers.
Speaker 1: Deer are horrible. They're horrible. They I mean really they
where I live, they're really bad. They hang out in town,
they nibble everything down, and they all look like shit too,
Like they've all got it looks like they've got main
or some sort of you could tell they've probably got
the parasites on those things. I mean, not just the tics,
but other disease. Yeah, yeah, and then there's probably some
sort of mite that they get to because they all
look scraggly and there's patches of fur that it's you know,
we've fucked up this ecosystem, this civilization we have with
with its mentality. You know, we haven't. We were able
to separate ourselves from nature through agriculture and technology, and
then you know, goat ourselves into thinking, fool ourselves into
thinking we didn't need it anymore unless it directly benefited us.
And so here we are with these ecological ruins. If
you don't hold the life around you to be sacred
and don't have a reverence for it, you end up
with this, you know, and fucking Elon Muskus wants to
take us to Mars now. And you know, you've got
this man, this grown ass man, doing these horrible dances,
and you could very clearly tell he just never got
validation as a youngster. It probably doesn't go to therapy,
and now he's desperate for it. He just wants to
be cool. But it's he's going to take all of
us downe It's going to take all of us down
with him. Oh God, the lack of self love, it
has such far reaching repercussions depending on the individual. So
this beach leaf disease, I mean, you guys are working
with that is what's the target of approach you have there?
Speaker 2: So right now we're trying to understand the disease and
get a good understanding of the life cycle of the
nematode and how it's transmitted between trees and how it
overwinters and and things like that, and eventually, if we're
able to develop a tissue culture and a transformation protocol
for beach, we could potentially start testing genes for resistance
against that disease.
Speaker 1: But again it'd be like a century before if this,
you know, before you're able to actually restore an ecosystem,
but you got to start somewhere and you'll at least
be preserved being genetic diversity. So this nematode is it
it's just the nematod that goes nuts. It's not the
nematod introducing a fungus like you've got with you know,
American elms, like the beetle is the vector for Dutch
elm disease? Is it the case like that or is it?
Is it just the nema toad.
Speaker 2: Right, that's something we're still working to understand. We don't
know yet if there's anything else involved other than the nematod,
But the nematod definitely is the causal agent that coaxed
postulates have been completed with that. It's been you know,
found on trees, isolated, inoculated onto healthy trees which then
became disease. So it certainly is the nematoad causing the problem.
Speaker 1: What about hemlock wooly addle jide.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's another big problem. We haven't started working with that,
but I certainly would like to work with that because
hemlocks are a really important species in our area, but
obviously across the entire East Coast. It would be nice
to be able to develop some lines that are resistant
to that.
Speaker 1: But it's I mean, that's a similar case. It's they're
probably I think that I didn't even look, but they're
from Asia. Native hemlock over there that isn't driven to
extinction by them, and then they they're brought over here
and now they can they're taking apart hemlocks here.
Speaker 2: Yes, yep, what's the name?
Speaker 1: What's the do you know the native host of adult
kids in Asia? I don't Probably another Suga species. I
could look that up. But got the list of tree
pathogens in North America that are just wrecking forests here
as well. Emerald ashbor that's another one. Have you guys
worked with those at all.
Speaker 2: We haven't worked with those, but I am aware that
there are people in other labs that are working on that.
I believe the US Forest Services working on approaches for
emerald ashboard.
Speaker 1: Okay, what species of Suga this hemlock wooly addl jid
hit in Asia, Suga cenensis, do moosa see boldy eye? Yeah,
so those are all probably resistant, but uh, Suga caroliniana
and Suga canadensis in eastern North America before nineteen fifty one,
the adult jid was introduced, Like man, I bet it's
pathogenic as hell on western hemlocks as well. Damn, what's
with Do you know anything about Dutch elm disease and
the the Beatles?
Speaker 2: Yeah, actually, we're working on ELM in our lab. We're
not working on Dutch ELM, but we're actually working on
elm yellows. Have you heard of that disease? No?
Speaker 1: What's that?
Speaker 2: It's so that's like the second disease of ELM that
I think came after Dutch ELM. And it's a bacterial
infection of the vascular tissue of the floam tubes. It's
a it's a fytal plasma similar to like citrus greening
if you're familiar with that, and it's spread by leaf hoppers.
Speaker 1: Native leaf hoppers or invasive ones.
Speaker 2: I believe they are native.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, do you know the beetles that hit the
the elm trees and spread Dutch helm? Are they native?
Speaker 2: I'm not sure. I'm not sure about that one.
Speaker 1: I could, I could look that up. Okay, So, well,
tell me about this, uh, this other pathoge in this bacteria.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so it's this bacteria is a phytal plasma, which
is kind of like a strange type of bacteria that
they're really hard to study because you can't culture them.
They they they have to be within host tissue, and
so that makes studying it very difficult because you can't
culture it and do your normal types of studies you
do on microbes. And so it's causing this flowing tube disorder.
It causes the tree to turn yellow, so we call
it elm yellows. First you'll see the leaves of the
county to turn yellow and then eventually the tree dies.
And so we're looking at creating transformation protocols and testing
genes for both the bacteria and potentially for the vector
as well. That that leaf hopper.
Speaker 1: Jesus, Okay, yeah, I just looked. Yeah, the bark beetles
that are the beetles that's yeah, it's a bark beetle.
The bark beetles that spread Dutch some of them are native,
So that's gonna be that's gonna be another component of
the ecosystem that's removed if elms goes a beetle that
that you know, needs that that parasitizes it, but doesn't
take it out unless this fungus is present. So God,
that's fucking it's brutal. So what is the with this?
How far? How widespread is this this bacteria that that
hits elm trees? And what's it called? Yellow?
Speaker 2: What? Yeah? Elm? Yellows elm the yellow Okay, spread it
on the East coast and I don't think it's spread
across the entire range yet. But yeah, it's like an
emerging disease.
Speaker 1: Do you know, are there is there any resistance and
also was there any resistance to Dutch elm disease among
American elms?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I don't think there's resistance to either of them
in the pure species.
Speaker 1: Jesus God, that's fucking and probably a similar case, millions
of years of co evolution in another ecosystem and then
you bring that bacteria or that fungus here and it
just runs wild. Hmm, Well, so you've.
Speaker 2: Something else I wanted to mention is that we're working
with the two other American chests on species, the Ozark
chinkapin and the Allegheny chinkapin. I guess there's one other
species that we're not working.
Speaker 1: With, Alabamensis. Yes, there's an Alabama. Those have some resistance,
don't they.
Speaker 2: I'm not aware of that, but that I haven't looked
into that. They they've done testing on those for blight resistance. Yeah,
for which one, the Alabama mensis?
Speaker 1: For any of them, they're they're all. I just know
Ozark Kansas is not as endangered as as Dentata. And
there's another one I saw in Florida, what a pumula
is not as endangered. Do you know? Do you know
why that might be? And is that is that even true?
Speaker 2: Yeah? So with Pumola, the Allegheny chinkapin, it's got quite
a bit of a different growth habit than the American chestnut.
American chess note has just one single stem. It grows
in like a timber type tree, whereas the Alleghany chinkapin
is like a shrub, a multi stem shrub. So if
it gets infected one of its branches and it loses
it to blight, it can be easily caught and saated
for because it's already a shrub, so it can just
send up more shoots.
Speaker 1: So that flowers earlier too and produces. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's much shorter, so it's less of an
issue there. But the ozark chincapin is, uh, just like
the American chess. It has like the greet the timber
type growth with this single stem. So it was pretty
devastated when blade came through. And it is very limited
in its range. So we've begun working with the ozark
chinkapin to increase resistance in that tree as well.
Speaker 1: Where does that Where does that occur.
Speaker 2: The ozark chinkapin. Yeah, yeah, it's in the Ozark Mountains
in like Arkansas, and it's it's a very limited range.
I think Mississippi. It goes into a little bit in Missouri.
Speaker 1: Diverged from data probably last few million years.
Speaker 2: I would assume, yeah, that it's unclear. I remember reading
a paper about that, and there's the the genomics are
kind of strange because they were unsure how much hybridization
had occurred, and uh, when when that diversions occurred, whether
because they're very different with their their nut morphology, that
chinkpin has just like that single nut, whereas the Dentata
has the three nuts per bur and you see that
in Asian species too. There's the chinkapin there that have
like a single nut, and the Chinese shots sound has
the three nuts. So it's unclear to me when that
diversions happened, if they came here at the same time,
or if they came as a single species and split.
It's kind of an interesting question. Yeah, I don't think
the definitive answer to.
Speaker 1: Yet producing one nut per burr. I'd assume that you
could just produce more more burrs then, and it's maybe
it's cost saving on that, you know, in terms of
energy for the tree and probably faster, I would assume.
I don't know, I don't know. I don't know what
the adaptive benefits, if any there would be, you know,
in seed size or seed number to fruit. But it's
interesting stuff to think about. How big does the the
ozark chikapin.
Speaker 2: Get it's quite a bit shorter than the American chests.
Not I'm not actually sure what the maximum height is.
I would say maybe like sixty feet sounds about right,
so it's still a decent sized tree, but it's not
massive like the American chess.
Speaker 1: How big were some of the American chestnuts, because those
photos you find online they're huge. How tall can they get?
Speaker 2: I'm not sure what the max is, but I know
the tallest one right now is one hundred and fifteen feet,
so at least at large.
Speaker 1: Probably one hundred so it's safe to assume probably one
hundred and forty hundred and fifty feet on some of
those old growth ones that can probably lick. Because I
wonder those trees in those photos they're I mean they're
six feet diameter, breast tight, they're fucking huge. They must
have been massive. I wonder how long they can live?
How long? How what's the most East Coast oaks? How
long can they live? You know, five six centuries or something.
Speaker 2: I know that the European chestnuts. There's European chestnuts that
are like over a thousand years old over there, so
I would.
Speaker 1: Reliably dated, not just estimated, but have been stem board
like tree ring counted or what.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and uh, there's I believe it's in Sardinia.
They have these very old chess on farms and that
you know, they're growing trees there that are over eight
hundred years old.
Speaker 1: We're Sardinia. Is that in Italy?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's in the Mediterranean. It's an island.
Speaker 1: You ever want to go there?
Speaker 2: Oh, I would love to go there. Yeah, that'd be great.
Speaker 1: I'm going to go there sometime. I want to see
if my if my fucking you know, because I'm not
making any any you know, claims that I wonder if
the you know, my fucking I just want something to
blame my psychological flows on. They're they're not flashing laws
I exploit. But I've heard I've heard a lot of these,
you know, behavioral traits that I exhibit might be a
result of ancestry. So I wonder, you know, reckless driving, uh,
you know, wild gesticulations, fucking loudness, neurosis, but you know,
sometimes over sensitivity. I wonder if those anyway, I'd love
to go there.
Speaker 2: Anyway on your Italian ancestry, right, yeah.
Speaker 1: Okay, well listen, sorry, we were talking about Sardinia, I
distracted us.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So they've got and I believe it's Sardinia. It's
one of those Mediterranean islands. And they've got this old
culture of chestnut agriculture there, and they've got these massive
old European chestnut trees there that produce you know, tons
of nuts every year. So and they've been lying on
those for centuries.
Speaker 1: How do they not get the blight? Because it's dry there?
Because it's dry.
Speaker 2: Air, yeah, and they might have never had an introduction.
Speaker 1: Do you think I mean arid climate where you have
arid summers probably helps a lot, right, because for the
fungus to produce spores, it's ever to produce the ascocarps,
it's gotta the little mushrooms, it's gotta you have to
have a reasonable amount of humidity. Or does the humidity
help it travel? Do you any you know anything about
that effects of aridity on on the ability to spread
of this fungus.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is kind of why they're able to grow
well on the West coast. We believe is because the
the dry air is not as conducive to the spores traveling.
The knidia spores that the asexual spores are need to
be moist otherwise they will die, and so I think
that prevents a lot of its spreading.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because it's I mean it's you rarely get warmth
and humidity on the West coast. I'm talking about like
significant well like not like summer humidity like you get
on the east, and so you put those little mushrooms
out there and they just fucking they're going to have
a hard time surviving when the air is just pulling
moisture out of them.
Speaker 2: Right, So maybe that has something to do. And you
know what, it wasn't Serginia. It was Corsica, That's what.
Speaker 1: Yeah, where's Corsca? Is that in Italy?
Speaker 2: It's in the French Mediterranean.
Speaker 1: I think you said, never been over the Mediterranean. The
Mediterranean lifestyle should be over to just eating olives and
sucking on tubes olive oil. And they make this tomato
paste now in a tube. You can get it at
Trader Joe's. You got a Trader Joe's and Syracuse.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we do.
Speaker 1: Fuck, I wish we had that out here. I have
to go to like San Antonio to get it. But
I'm telling you, man, that tube tomato paste. You know,
it's like a little snack it it'll change your life.
So there's groves of this stuff in Corsica of Castania.
Speaker 2: Sativa, yes, very old trees, and they have a whole
culture there. You know, they've got their their mills and stuff.
In the fall. During harvest time, they're making lots of
chestnut beer and chestnut bread and chestnut desserts and all
that stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're delicious pigs. There was a tree in a
there was a tree in Mount Shasta and I used
to I'd be up there, you know for work sometimes
when I worked for the railroad, and there was a
tree in two trees in someone's yard of Mount Shasta,
and they would let me come get trees out of
their backyard and or not get trees, get seeds out
of their backyard because they would just fall and they
didn't want them. And so I would get like bushels
of these fucking and it was casting a stativa. I'm
pretty sure not Melissa, and I would just get bushels
of these these nuts. Was they were fucking delicious. And
you stick a fork in and put them in the oven,
spraying with some olive oil and then just crack them open.
And snack. God, they were still good, man.
Speaker 2: I love roasted chestnuts.
Speaker 1: Are there are there any groves of Melissima in New
York that you know of? A on the East Coast?
I mean, because I would I presume they can grow
those fine out there. Huh. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Actually, there is a an up and coming chestnut industry
that's starting on the East Coast, and those are mostly
Chinese seedling trees. There's this program at the University of
I believe it's Missouri called HARK and They've got these
very well tuned cultivars of Chinese and hybrids that they breed.
They breed together, and then they send those seeds out
to people to plant orchards with. And so these newer
orchards that are coming online are mostly Melissima seedling trees.
Speaker 1: And how are How are the Chinese chests taste? They're
still pretty good? Yeah.
Speaker 2: I actually like the Chinese chestnuts the best of all
the nuts I've tasted. I think Chinese. The Chinese ones
I've had are the best.
Speaker 1: What doesta taste like? Are they good?
Speaker 2: Yeah? They're good. The main issue with them is others
was small, so you have to do a lot of
work to get a little bit of food out of them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but again we're not far who cares about, you know,
anthropocentric use. We're carried, but we're concerned about restoring the ecosystem.
And also I'm sure if you know, people would appreciate
the lumber at some point too. Chestnut lumbers is supposed
to be fucking great.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's definitely preferable for wildlife to have those little nuts,
so the blue jays, you know, can park their crops
full of those little nuts, and all the other smaller creters.
I think they prefer the smaller nut size versus the
you know, the giant things that come off of Chinese
chestnuts and Japanese chestnuts.
Speaker 1: But the wood, though, I mean, if you were trying
to do like a like a couple of acre lumber
plantation not my favorite thing in the world, but it's
got to happen occasionally, and you would want to plant.
I mean, chestnut wood is it's mostly for ornamental use.
It's not really great for building or is it good
for building? Do anything about the actual wood.
Speaker 2: Well, one of the best properties of it is that
it's really wrought resistant. What they would use it for
is stuff for outdoor exposures, so they would use it
for like barns or like fence posts or telephone polls,
stuff like that, because it's really route resistant and learn't
have to treat it with chemicals, so it.
Speaker 1: Would be like a like an East Coast equivalent of
red seeds. And yeah, damn well, Eric, I want to
thank you for coming on again and for explaining all
of this, and I'm really happy that it's still it's
still happening. I'm really happy to I mean, what are
we looking at in terms of time when these can,
you know, be introduced to the ecosystem again, or when
they can especially be available to the public, these transgendic
American chestnuts.
Speaker 2: We're hoping pretty soon. We would have thought it would
be done already, but there's been few delays along the way.
And the current delay right now is that there is
a change of administration and so all the those agencies
are going through like a shuffling of employees and stuff
like that, which which always happens during changes of administration.
So that will probably delay things a little bit. But
we're towards the end of the process. We've done all
the paperwork and all that stuff, so we're we're hoping
within the next you know, year or two.
Speaker 1: But you guys are regulated. This is going to be
regulated by what federal agencies.
Speaker 2: By the USDA, the e p A, and the FDA.
Speaker 1: Oh well, the e p A and the FDA might
not even exist in you know, a year, So I
guess there's that going for you, right, four years of
fucking chaos. Man. I'm I'm just like God, I don't care.
You know, I don't get into politics people have. I
don't need people to fucking agree with me one hundred percent.
I don't care people get duped.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: The fucking American left has its own share of wacos,
of which I've certainly exposed, especially when I live in
the bear. I just fucking like the mean girl syndrome too,
just fucking but but still, I mean, it's just the
fucking chaos. It's going to ensue chaos and incompetence and whatever.
Speaker 2: You know, I've learned it's really hard to predict what
they're going to do. They'll We've been given all kinds
of timelines of when to expect things to happen, and
it's pretty rare when those timelines are adhered to. So
it's hard because people will ask when this is going
to happen, and I want to give a definitive answer,
but it's just really hard for any of us to
know what to expect because it's it's really out of
our hands.
Speaker 1: I mean, but literally, the EPA might not exist, might
not exist. But dude, he's got RFK, he's got RFK.
Don't worry. What is So you're thinking three or four years?
Maybe if you think it will take longer than that,
what estimate? Just throw it out there and no one's
going to hold you to it. No one's gonna put
your feet in the fire if you're wrong.
Speaker 2: What do you think, Well, I would say probably closer
to one to two because we're at the end of
the process. We actually submitted our paperwork in twenty twenty,
so it's been a full four years already and it's
gone through most of the processes it needs to go through.
So we're at the end. The question is how long
is it going to take for like these final steps.
Hopefully it shouldn't be too much longer. I'm mostly optimistic,
but it's like I said, it's just really hard to
predict what comes next.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but I mean I guess once it's out, then
it's out. And then you can get people like backyard propagators,
you know, buying a bunch of these and trying to
do their you know, basically start their own chess American
chestnut orchards. Yeah, and potentially doing more work. I mean,
then it's kind of then it's out there. Once the
cat's out the bag, then it's fucking I mean, that's
kind of what I hope happens, because there's some there's
some amazing people just doing crazy shit in their back
are that it's pretty cool. I mean someone you might
get someone like who's retired as you know, stable income
and is like, I'm just going to fucking breathe thousands
of these things now, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, I'm really excited about that. And there's there
are people who have been waiting a long time for
these trees and are very enthusiastic about doing what you
just said. So that's kind of something I'm the most
excited about, is getting the trees into those people's hands,
so you know, they can start going to town with
these trees.
Speaker 1: Meanwhile, what is going on with the back cross breeding?
I guess we should mention that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, their organization, they've done kind of like a change
in strategy. They've been approaching back cross breeding from trying
to get trees that are just like minimally Chinese and
like mostly American. They were going for a fraction. They
were going for like fifteenth sixteenth American and then like
one sixteenth Chinese genetics. But that was before or they
made their discovery that all these genes are on all
the different chromosomes of the Chinese russ on. So they've
readjusted their strategy a bit so that they're breeding for
higher levels of Chinese genetics so they can get more
Morval's resistance alleles in their hybrid population.
Speaker 1: Because it's not just one it's not just one genetic
low side. It's not just one location on the genome.
It's how many dozens, hundreds?
Speaker 2: What? Yeah, there's losai on every chromosome with unknown numbers
of genes at each low side, so it could be
as much as thousands.
Speaker 1: Jesus christ Man. That's that's good luck with that that's
going to take for that's like that. It really is
like the monkey and the typewriter analogy, just hoping that
you end up. I mean, it's I don't know, but
they're still I mean, they're still doing it. It's better
than nothing, but it was there was the method that
existed before we had genetic modification.
Speaker 2: I I don't think that any one method is going
to be the solution. So I think that obviously I
believe in what we're doing, but I think that it's
gonna take a combination of breeding and genetic engineering and
then maybe some of that biocontrol we were talking about
with the super donor restrains. It's gonna it's gonna take
a combination approach to be able to get to the
restoration goal that we're all shooting for.
Speaker 1: Do you know what's up with are they are they
like mapping the genomes? Are they mapping what they're doing?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 1: Is there any way for them to have oversight over
what different phenotypes they're creating, Like where they can actually
map the genome and see, oh okay, I see when
we move this pollen to this overary. Uh this this happened,
We created this phenotype that's got these genes and et cetera.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's actually exactly what they're doing. They're doing genomics
based selection, so they they look at the the genotypes
of their best trees, and so they can see where
these low sie are and then when they do their
next generations of breeding, they can go and do genotyping
on their offspring and do a little bit of selection
based just on the genomics versus you know, stem inoculation assets.
So they're doing like pre screening using genetics.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because I remember I visited one of their fields
in College Station. No it wasn't college Station, what is it,
pennsyl Is it college Station, Pennsylvania?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I remember, God, the fucking field was loaded
with ticks. That was my first experience with East Coast tics.
God talk about the graded ecosystems. Got to bring fireback
to those those ecosystems. But but I remember going out
there and seeing, you know, they were inoculated all these
trees planted, They were inoculating them, testing them for blight resistance.
But now it seems like they may not even I mean,
they still need to do that, but that would be
a last step because now you can just look at
the genome of the chest and see what genes it's inherited,
and I mean you can you look at it. You
can probably look at a chestnut genome and see whether
it's whether that genome has light resistance or whether it's susceptible.
Speaker 2: Right, you can make predictions for sure by looking at
some of these low si and whether or not they've
been inherited. So you could look at a seedling that
has inherited you know, low si you know, one, two, three, whatever,
and say, okay, well there's probably a fifty percent chance
that this is going to have increased resistance because it's
inherited this. So that's that's the type of work that
they're developing right now.
Speaker 1: Okay, cool, So there is Yeah, you can make somewhat
accurate predictions. Well, I guess that's sums I guess that
sums it up. Man. Thanks again for coming on. And
I guess if you want to, you know, put anything
out there for people who are interested in your work
to read about or look up, and now's your chance.
Speaker 2: Sure. Our website is ESF dot E slash chestnut. We
do regular updates on there, including publishing some of our
data and other news around the project. If you're on Facebook,
we have a Facebook group called the American Chestnut Research
and Restoration Project, and if you join that group, we
have discussions about chestnuts, people post pictures of their treaties
and discuss topics around restoration, and we also post our
updates there.
Speaker 1: Okay, well, great man, thanks a lot, appreciate you coming
on and until next time, thanks a lot. Joy Okay,