BLACKSBURG, Va., Feb. 24 -- Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University issued the following news release:
Research at a glance
For more than a century, scientists and conservationists have tried to bring back the American chestnut, a tree once so common it shaped forests across the eastern United States.
Now, Virginia Tech researchers and their partners have shown that genomic tools can dramatically speed up that effort, helping breeders predict which young trees are most likely to survive chestnut blight long before they reach maturity.
The new research shows that it is possible to identify blight-resistant trees that are still mostly American chestnut, preserving the height, growth, and forest competitiveness that made the sp...