Two U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists may have discovered "the map to El Dorado" for the American elm—a previously hidden population of elms that may carry genes for resistance to Dutch elm disease. The disease kills individual branches and eventually the entire tree within one to several years. It has been accepted for 80 years that American elms (Ulmus americana) are tetraploids, trees with four copies of each chromosome. But there have also been persistent but dismissed rumors of trees that had fewer copies—triploids, which have three copies of chromosomes, or diploids, which have two copies. Now botanist Alan T. Whittemore and geneticist Richard T. Olsen with USDA's Agricultural Research Service (ARS) have proven beyond question that diploid American elms exist as a subset of elms in the wild. Their findings will be published in the April 2011 edition of the American Journal of Botany and were released online on March 30, 2011. Whittemore and Olsen work at the U.S. National Arboretum operated by ARS in Washington, D.C. American elms once lined the country's streets and dominated eastern forests until they succumbed by the millions after Dutch elm disease arrived in the United States in 1931. Yet elms are still one of the most important tree crops for the $4.7 billion-a-year nursery industry, especially since the introduction of a very few new trees with some tolerance to the disease. American elms remain popular because of their stately beauty, their rapid leaf litter decay, and their ability to stand up to city air pollution. It was one of the disease-tolerant elm trees—Jefferson, released jointly by ARS and the National Park Service in 2005—that put Whittemore and Olsen on the trail of the diploid. "Jefferson is a triploid.Login Or Register To Read Full Story