[yinser]

There is a pretty fascinating correlation here between growth rate and susceptibility to mortality from the fungal infection. Remove the toxicity of oxalic acid and suddenly growth rate reduces. Obviously there’s a ton of variables but, oversimplifying, it almost seems like a deal with the devil: increase growth rates but at the cost of increased mortality to the blight.

[anonymouskimmer]

The 35S promoter is a really strong constitutive promoter. Just expressing the OxO gene from it could be enough of a metabolic cost as to be noticeably growth inhibitory, much less the effect of the unintentional gene knockout.

It looks like they have a good plan for future engineering: Induced expression only in cells in the infected part of the tree.