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The American Chestnut Cooperators Foundation is a 501 non-profit scientific and educational foundation, organized in 1984, dedicated to restoring the American chestnut to its former place in the United States' Eastern hardwood forests. Priorities include the development of blight resistant all-American chestnuts and economical biological control measures against chestnut blight in the forest environment. ACCF supports American chestnut research and engages senior citizens and school children, volunteers and professionals in planting, grafting and managing the fruits of this research.
Breeding for blight resistance is currently pursued by two separate foundations: The American Chestnut Foundation is developing advanced hybrids, building on the work of earlier breeders to improve tree form while enhancing resistance; the American Chestnut Cooperators Foundation is not using Oriental genes for blight resistance, but intercrossing among American chestnuts selected for native resistance to the blight.
"All-American intercrosses" defines the breeding strategy of the ACCF; John Rush Elkins, a research chemist and professor emeritus of chemistry at Concord University, and Gary Griffin, professor of plant pathology at Virginia Tech, think there may be several different characteristics which favor blight resistance. By making intercrosses among resistant American chestnuts from many locations, they expect to improve upon the levels of blight resistance to make an American chestnut that can compete in the forest.
Griffin developed a scale for assessing levels of blight resistance, which made it possible to make selections scientifically. He inoculated five-year-old chestnuts with a standard lethal strain of the blight fungus and measured growth of the cankers. Chestnuts with no resistance to blight make rapid-growing, sunken cankers that are deep and kill tissue right to the wood. Resistant chestnuts make slow-growing, swollen cankers that are superficial: live tissue can be recovered under these cankers. The level of blight resistance is judged by periodic measurement of cankers.