Details

Common Name American Chestnut
Genus Castanea
Species dentata
Description

One hundred years ago, stately American chestnuts were the dominant canopy tree species in the eastern hardwood forests with a 200 million acre range. American chestnut often grew to five feet in diameter and one hundred feet in height. It was adapted to a wide variety of sites, and was more abundant than any other forest tree species in the East, accounting for 25% of all hardwoods along the spine of the Appalachian Mountains. Native wildlife depended on the tree's abundant crops of nutritious nuts, forming a staple food for a wide variety of animals such as turkey, ruffed grouse, and black bears. Rural societies also used chestnuts for many food products.
In 1904 the chestnut blight (Cryphonectria parasitica (Murrill) Barr), an Asian phytopathogenic ascomycete, to which American chestnut had no resistance, entered the US and spread quickly, killing 4 billion trees. Within 50 years it had spread throughout chestnut's entire range and the species had essentially disappeared. The American chestnut persisted only as rare escapes and stump sprouts not yet infected with the disease. The chestnut ecosystem was lost, replaced by oak-hickory forests, which have greatly reduced productivity. Two factors have prevented the American chestnut from becoming extinct. The blight fungus cannot survive in soil, and American chestnut has a tremendous capacity to produce stump sprouts. Occasionally sprouts will manage to escape infection and live long enough to mature and produce flowers.
Version 3 Unigene
The version 3 unigene includes an expanded set of American Chestnut 454 sequences: 126,791 new sequences from library ACHS1n and 162,624 new sequences from library ACHS2n. This unigene is still being analyzed and is not in the database yet, but the files are here for download. A total of 688,198 454 sequences were run through cap3, resulting in 45,288 contigs.


Feature Summary

The current types of data available for this organism:

EST 688,198
contig 63,690
point_mutation 11,924
microsatellite 6,605