USDA Deregulates GM Blight-Resistant American Chestnut Tree
05 October 2026, New York: The U.S. Department of Agriculture has formally deregulated Darling 54, a genetically engineered American chestnut tree bred to withstand the blight fungus that wiped out the species across the eastern United States a century ago. The decision, dated August 28, 2026 under Federal Register notice 2026-17596, follows a six-year federal review and removes one of the last major regulatory barriers before the tree can be used in forest restoration.
APHIS, the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, concluded that Darling 54 is “unlikely to pose a greater plant pest risk than its unmodified counterpart,” the standard the agency uses to clear genetically engineered plants for release outside of regulated field trials. The tree still needs a separate sign-off from the Environmental Protection Agency before it can be distributed widely or planted in restoration projects on public land, so the August decision is a milestone rather than a final green light.
Darling 54 carries an added gene that strengthens the tree’s natural tolerance to Cryphonectria parasitica, the blight fungus accidentally introduced to North America in the early 1900s. Within a few decades, the pathogen killed roughly 4 billion American chestnut trees and erased a species that once made up as much as a quarter of the forest canopy across parts of its native range, which once spanned 25 states in the eastern United States.
Three decades of breeding lead to a regulatory first
The work behind Darling 54 traces back more than 30 years to research started by the late Dr. William Powell at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY-ESF) in Syracuse. Dr. Andrew Newhouse, who now directs the American Chestnut Research and Restoration Project at SUNY-ESF, has led the program since Powell’s retirement in 2022. The research has since been paired with a commercialization partner, SilvaBio, co-founded by chairman Andrew Serazin and chief executive Michael Bloom, which is organizing the regulatory and distribution path for the tree alongside groups including American Chestnut Restoration Inc., the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service, University of New England and Purdue University.
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Newhouse called the decision a sign of hope for “the use of biotechnology to address many other threats,” a comment that points to the broader significance backers see in the ruling. A successful, federally cleared genetically engineered forest tree sets a procedural template that other researchers working on disease-resistant trees, from ash to elm to hemlock, are likely to study closely. SilvaBio has framed the restoration effort partly in economic terms too, noting that U.S. forests contribute an estimated 350 billion dollars a year to the economy and absorb nearly 15 percent of the country’s carbon emissions, figures the company uses to argue that tree health is an economic issue as well as an ecological one.
SilvaBio has also pointed to a practical production benefit of working with an engineered line: breeding programs using Darling 54 can compress the time needed to produce blight-tolerant seedlings, cutting what has historically been a roughly 10-year backcrossing and selection cycle down toward a single growing season in some cases. That matters because restoration at meaningful scale requires producing large volumes of genetically diverse, blight-tolerant seedlings rather than a handful of research specimens.
What the decision does not yet do
Deregulation changes how APHIS regulates the tree going forward, but it does not instantly put seedlings in the ground across the chestnut’s former range. Large-scale outplanting on federal land will still depend on the pending EPA review, on seed orchard capacity to produce enough genetically diverse stock, and on individual state and landowner decisions. SilvaBio and its research partners have not given a public timeline for when Darling 54 seedlings might become widely available outside of research plantings.
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