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By Aoife Brennan, CEO of Synlogic, as part of the From The Trenches feature of LifeSciVC.
From the first time I heard the story of the American chestnut, I was fascinated. It is a story with threads from history, ecology, conservation and biotechnology- it was difficult for a scientist who loves the outdoors not to get sucked in.
The American chestnut was an important tree species in the eastern forests both ecologically and economically until it succumbed to chestnut blight, an imported fungus that invades the trees and has resulted in this once stalwart of the forest becoming functionally extinct. From a population of > 4 billion trees,…