For those, like me, who wondered, why not just reclone the original Darling 58? Here is the answer from TACF: “ Why not then return to the “real” Darling 58? The first reason is that the Darling 58 also uses the 35S constitutive promoter which appears to result in a variety of metabolic costs to the tree and likely causes the majority of performance problems observed in the Darling line. Secondly, there are only a ha…
I’m still confused, why can’t they return to the real Darling 58? Are they saying even the real 58 is not that good, and if they are going to rewind that far back they might as well start from scratch?
I reread the above and realized that TACF isn’t as clear as they should/could be: they are supporting a newer strain, win3.12 [0], which, as alluded to above, expresses the OxO gene only when infected. This is metabolically less expensive. Thus there is no reason to spend effort looking for the Darling 58. I also gather from other sources that the TACF want to downplay that they are switching to this new strain, that this development of finding a bug in Darling 54 is a political salve[1] —- maybe they don’t want to offend somebody?
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34841616/
[1] https://ambrook.com/research/sustainability/GMO-chestnut-con...