American Chestnuts of Michigan

LSA Breeding Strategy

  • Locate LSAs and gather scion for grafting clones.
  • Plant these clones in small controlled cross orchards.
  • Perform controlled pollinations between LSAs and AC specimens already categorized within the TACF genomic data.
  • Nuts from these trees will be grown out and surveyed for resistance scores. A preliminary score is determined through a small stem assay, where the tree is innoculated with a weakened strain of blight and the response is scored. Additional nuts are grown in a test orchard for further scoring. The resulting data from the offspring are added to the RGS data set, which will return crosses most likely to provide blight resistance. The process is repeated with the idea that resistance can be amplified over subsequent generations with pure AC genetics.