Instead of healthy young stems, our newly acquired pear tree looked like it was being scorched by extreme heat. Indeed, that's where the name "fire blight" comes from, and it's the easiest way to ...

Soon, those trees were dead, as the pathogenic fungus known simply as “blight” found its way through cracks in the bark and bore into the wood, destroying the trees’ vascular system and ...

From left to right, the trees are a blight-susceptible wild-type American chestnut (C. dentata) called Ellis 1, a blight-resistant Chinese chestnut (C. mollissima) tree called 'Qing,' and two ...

Several decades later, we are seeking government approval to begin distributing the first blight-tolerant transgenic American chestnut. These trees were produced by inserting a gene called oxalate ...