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Home → Publications → American Chestnut Proceedings → 1992 → Breeding Blight Resistant American Chestnut

Breeding Blight Resistant American Chestnut

The objective of the breeding program of The American Chestnut Foundation is to utilize the blight resistance of Chinese chestnut in a backcross program to introduce resistance into American chestnut. Some Chinese chestnuts have high resistance to chestnut blight, and usually cross well with American chestnut and the progeny usually show high viability. Several different sources of disease resistance are used, and several different American chestnut trees are used as the recurrent parent. The published results and our own observations on the genetic variability observed in the progenies would suggest that the progenies represent a reasonably complete random sample of recombinants. The basis of The American Chestnut Foundation's breeding program is to test Charles Burnham's hypothesis that states: 1) resistance to blight is controlled by a relatively small number of genes; and, 2) by backcrossing for several generations to American chestnut, it will be possible to develop trees that possess all features of the American chestnut but have resistance to blight.


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Author(s): Albert Ellingboe

Publication: American Chestnut Proceedings - 1992