American chestnut trees once made up 25 percent of the eastern forest. People could pick chestnuts and roast them on an open fire. Their wood was used to make everything from telephone poles to musical instruments. But by 1950, the chestnut trees of North America had been wiped out by a fast-spreading fungus - a non-native species from Asia. So researchers at the American Chestnut Foundation were thrilled when a small stand of chestnuts was discovered in Georgia. These trees apparently can do what scientists and plant breeders just couldn?t get chestnuts to do: resist the fungal blight. How did they manage to survive? Why did these particular chestnut trees resist the blight when others couldn't? It's still a mystery to the Georgia Department of Environmental Resources, but state biologist Nathan Klaus is collecting pollen from the trees. He believes the pollen may hold a genetic solution to the blight that nearly destroyed the American chestnut.

American chestnut trees once made up 25 percent of the eastern forest. People could pick chestnuts and roast them on an open fire. Their wood was used to make everything from telephone poles to musical instruments. But by 1950, the chestnut trees of North America had been wiped out by a fast-spreading fungus - a non-native species from Asia. So researchers at the American Chestnut Foundation were thrilled when a small stand of chestnuts was discovered in Georgia. These trees apparently can do what scientists and plant breeders just couldn?t get chestnuts to do: resist the fungal blight. How did they manage to survive? Why did these particular chestnut trees resist the blight when others couldn't? It's still a mystery to the Georgia Department of Environmental Resources, but state biologist Nathan Klaus is collecting pollen from the trees. He believes the pollen may hold a genetic solution to the blight that nearly destroyed the American chestnut.