It Begins!

Or began. The first step in this project, which occurred last December, was to harvest soil from the various places around upstate New York. Although many species of mycorrhizae are available as cultures, there's substantial debate over whether or not this is the best way to introduce them to plants. There's evidence to suggest that cultures get weaker over time, and experiments that tried different methods to get cultured mycorrhizae onto the American chestnut's cousins, the oaks, were unsuccessful. So in our lab, we're trying what's called a bioassay - essentially, going out into the woods, picking up some soil and the fungi in it, and taking it back to the lab where the chestnut can negotiate with a bunch of different potential partners.

The downside of this strategy is that the results can be very random and hard to repeat, so if this project is successful, it will be necessary to figure out who the chestnut's favorite fungi are and to see if we can isolate them. But for now, one step at a time.

After the soil was prepared, it was time to plant. Soil and chestnuts were loaded into pots and placed in a growth chamber, which looks like a giant walk-in fridge and makes a variety of humming and hissing noises. The growth chamber allows the project to keep to a relatively tight schedule, by letting us grow plants in the otherwise agriculturally-unfriendly Syracuse winter. Germination followed relatively rapidly, and by April things were looking good!