American chestnut tree screen.JPG

The American chestnut tree once dominated the native forest, but a fungus killed most of the billions of trees that ranged from Alabama to Maine. Now, Alabama's HuntsvilleAlpha Institute for biotechnology has joined the fight to bring the tree back. (Courtesy of The American Chestnut Foundation)

"Chestnuts roasting on an open fire ..."

Most of us know this opening line of a classic Christmas carol, but it was more than a bygone image for most of American history. American chestnut trees, 4 billion strong, dominated the forests from Alabama to Maine from colonial times to the early 1900s. Their wood built American homes, and their nuts were so popular that, well, people wrote songs about them.

That was all before a fungus wiped out most of America's chestnuts starting in the 1880s. Billions of trees died, and it was more than loss of a holiday snack. The chestnut was a serious food source for animals and humans. Chestnut flour was an ingredient in Southern recipes for decades.

Some American chestnuts survive in Alabama and elsewhere in the East, and passionate people have been trying to bring the tree back through specialized breeding programs. Now, Huntsville's HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology is joining the fight. Institute researchers will sequence the DNA of American chestnuts that survived to establish a scientific profile.

"If we can develop tools to do this with chestnuts, we can do this with almost any forest tree species," said Jeremy Schmutz, co-director of the HudsonAlpha Genome Sequencing Center. "This is a major issue now. You probably know about things like ash bore killing off all the ash trees, about the sudden oak death in California, which is being brought on in part by the drought. What we're seeing is many new pathogens ... entering our American ecosystem and causing major issues in the forests."

Where do these pathogens come from? Likely sources include Asian nursery stock and trade with Asia, Schmutz said, adding, "Globalization has pluses and minuses." Trade makes American agricultural products valuable in other countries, and it brings pathogens and insects from those countries to America.

The Chestnut is an excellent study subject, Schmutz said, and the methods developed studying it will be used again. Funding for the DNA analysis came from a grant by the Colcom Foundation to the American Chestnut Foundation.

The goal is to finish the genetic profile in a year to 18 months. And when that profile is complete, researchers will study the diversity of the chestnut trees that remain, study the fungus in detail, and develop a screening test to tell what trees are truly resistant.

"From the chestnut foundation perspective, the goal is how do we move forward with an intelligent plan for reintroducing these resistant trees," Schmutz said.

Even those trees face other challenges including a root fungus. "It's not that easy," he said. "None of these situations where you're talking about trying to reformulate the natural ecosystem is easy....It's an ambitious project trying to restore the American chestnut. It's a major undertaking."