This strain has never been found in any animal, so it is possible that it could have come from straight from the environment into humans.
But the biodiversity of farmland birds declined by 43%between 1970 and 1998. Continued population growth and climate change in the country will probably put more pressure on ecosystems in the future, further reducing benefits and services.
and the compounds that plants use to protect themselves against the Sun and predators. In specimens from one region of the Amazon rainforest in southern Peru, Asner and his wife, Robin Martin, identified 21 spectral traits that provided identifying signals for 90%of the species. A lot of people look at trees
because the regulations for GM plants derive from the Federal Plant Pest Act, a decades-old law intended to safeguard against plant pathogens from overseas.
The Plant Pest Act was completely inappropriate for regulating biotech crops, but the USDA jury-rigged it, says Bill Freese, science-policy analyst at the Center for Food safety in WASHINGTON DC.
Now we can foresee this loophole getting wider and wider as companies turn more to plants and away from bacteria and other plant-pest organisms.
which carried multiple genes for insect and herbicide resistance, were stable in the field. I would expect that by the end of the decade,
Nakanishi is coordinating seven teams to study the impact of the disaster on soil, plants, animals, fisheries and forests for the next decade,
making the plant produce toxins that confer resistance to some insect pests. A Bt cotton variety is being developed for Kenyan farmers at KARI.
The scientists also sequenced substantial sections of the heterozygous diploid variety RH, although due to its heterozygosity were not able to assemble it into a complete genome.
of which has potential for use in fighting devastating diseases such as the potato cyst nematode and the potato blight pathogen Phytophthora infestans, famous for causing The irish potato famine of the 1840s.
Mosquitoes score in chemical war: Nature Newskey weapons in the fight against malaria, pyrethroid insecticides, are losing their edge.
But they have created also intense selection pressure for mosquitoes to develop resistance. Data are coming in thick and fast indicating increasing levels of resistance,
Malaria-control programmes often lack insect-resistance monitoring, and detection of all forms of resistance is not easy.
Quick, cheap tests can pick out gene mutations that help the mosquitoes'nerve cells withstand pyrethroid attack. But other forms of resistance,
which depend on increased levels of mosquito enzymes that can destroy pyrethroids before they reach their target,
so that mosquitoes resistant to one would be killed by the other. In areas where pyrethroid bed nets are used,
Research targeting mosquito control is compared grossly underfunded with that on malaria drugs and vaccines she adds,
West africans at risk from bat epidemics: Nature Newsserious viruses carried by bats pose a considerable risk to people in West Africa,
warn epidemiologists cataloguing bat-human interactions in the region. Bats are thought to have been the source of several of the nastiest viruses to jump to humans from animals during the past 40 years,
including Ebola haemorrhagic fever and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), an outbreak of which killed more than 900 people in 2002-03.
which in many regions function as important fruit pollinators. Andrew Cunningham, a wildlife epidemiologist at the Institute of Zoology in London,
traditional bushmeat species such as apes and antelope are no longer easily available owing to over-hunting and, in some cases,
but in 2008 the team reported finding antibodies to them in Eidolon helvum fruit bats in Ghana, West Africa, indicating that these bats had been infected too1.
Patients and doctors are showered daily with bat urine which could be infected with the virus. Such huge colonies in residential areas are uncommon in Asia and Australasia.
were collected from a survey of 551 Ghanaian bat hunters, vendors and consumers. There is a massive bat-bushmeat industry in Ghana that has not been picked up in previous studies of the bushmeat trade
says Cunningham. All this adds up to a potentially disastrous public-health problem in West Africa, says Cunningham and one that is currently not recognized
says Andrew Dobson, an infectious-disease ecologist at Princeton university in New jersey who commends the project's focus.
To control the increasing occurrence of diseases making the jump from animals to humans, he says,
The invertebrate, named Eoandromeda octobrachiata because its body plan resembles the spiral galaxy Andromeda, suggests that the earliest branches in the tree need to be reordered,
believe that Eoandromeda is the ancient ancestor of modern ocean dwellers known as comb jellies gelatinous creatures similar to jellyfish,
it would be known the oldest fossil of a comb jelly. And that would support a rewrite of the animal tree.
Comb jellies sit alongside two other major groups near the base of the tree, but their relative positions remain contentious.
Normally, sponges are identified as the first to evolve, followed by the cnidaria jellyfish, sea anemones and their kin and then by the comb jellies.
Eoandromeda puts a little piece of weight in favour of a more basal position for comb jellies,
says Stefan Bengtson, a palaeontologist at the Swedish Museum of Natural history and a co-author on the paper.
This is in stark contrast to modern comb jellies, which, like humans, flies and sea anemones, have biradial
or bilateral symmetry their body plan can be sliced into only two identical pieces. If Eoandromeda appeared after the cnidarians,
the authors argue, bilateral symmetry would have to have evolved twice once for the cnidarians and again for the bilateral organisms that came after Eoandromeda.
Far simpler is the idea that Eoandromeda evolved first (see'Simplest solution'.'This model of animal relationships calls for the least number of origins of bilateral symmetry,
The proposal is in tune with DNA studies that place comb jellies closer to the root of the evolutionary tree.
His team recently sequenced the genome of the comb jelly Mnemiopsis leidyi, and is now comparing it to sequences from sponges,
cnidarians, worms and other animals to sort out which lineages came first. So far, he says,
the results suggest that sponges and comb jellies appeared before cnidarians2. The matter is settled far from, however.
Some scientists even doubt that the fossil is in fact that of a comb jelly. The eight spiral arms are reminiscent of the eight iridescent rows,
or combs, along the sides of modern comb jellies, but the fossil lacks some key characteristics of modern comb jellies, such as tentacles and a mouth.
Differences between living animals and ancient fossils are expected, but the differences also allow for debate. Eoandromeda fossils are excellent and very important
but the trouble is that the interpretation reflects the ideology of the person giving it,
says Dolph Seilacher, a retired palaeontologist at the University of T Â bingen in Germany who studies fossils from Eoandromeda's time.
In the 1980s, Seilacher argued that many of the bizarre fossils from this period were abnormally large,
single-celled, amoeba-like organisms in a kingdom he named Vendobionta3. Until the vendobionts went extinct,
multicellular animals lived in the shadow of these unicellular giants. To Seilacher, the golf-ball-sized Eoandromeda looks like one of these giants.
Bengtson says he can't prove the fossil is a comb jelly but its comb-like arms indicate that it is one.
The only reason to suggest they are vendobionts, he says, is that they happen to be of that age.
Claus Nielsen, a retired evolutionary biologist at the Natural history Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, doesn't think Eoandromeda represents comb jellies either.
Mcnulty also fed the five bacterial strains from the yoghurt to'gnotobiotic'mice animals raised
As with the twins, the yoghurt bacteria did not change the composition of the rodents'resident communities.
but gnotobiotic mouse models will be vital for such studies. Using the mice, he can examine the effect of probiotic foods under tightly controlled conditions,
with defined communities where all the actors and genes are known. The mouse models provide a foundation for critically evaluating the claims from manufacturers of functional foods and probiotics
he says. It's too early to be drawing conclusions, say other researchers. Dusko Ehrlich, a microbiologist at The french National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA), thinks that the team did not look at enough twins,
However, he cautions that there are limits to studying mice with human gut bacteria because different species have their own specifically evolved sets.
we're always looking to refine these mouse models to be more like the human context.
The fact that we see shared responses in mice and humans is good evidence that we're doing something right.
Microbes help giant pandas overcome meat-eating heritage: Nature Newsgiant pandas don't digest bamboo by themselves. Microorganisms in their guts may help the endangered animals to subsist on plants
despite a gut that is better suited to eating meat, finds an analysis published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1.
Pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) are among the pickiest eaters in the animal world. In the wild, they eat more than 12 kilograms of bamboo each day and little else.
They have to eat so much because, although bamboo contains proteins, sugars and fats among other nutrients,
A 1982 study of two pandas Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing in the Smithsonian National Zoological Park in WASHINGTON DC,
Most herbivores have developed ways to break down cellulose into sugars; for example, cows and other ruminants have complicated digestive systems involving multiple stomachs filled with microbes that process plants many times to extract the maximum nutrition.
But pandas are bears, a generally carnivorous family, and neither produce the enzymes necessary to digest cellulose nor harbour the same microbes as ruminants.
A broad survey of animal gut microbes found that pandas'microorganisms resembled those of black bears, polar bears and other meat-eaters3.
Fuwen Wei, an ecologist at the Institute of Zoology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing,
and his colleagues took a closer look at the microbes that live in the guts of giant pandas1.
The team collected stool samples from seven wild pandas in the Qinling and Xiangling mountains in central and western China,
as well as from eight captive pandas. By sequencing stool DNA, the researchers determined the different kinds of bacteria present,
Although wild and captive pandas have different diets and lifestyles the captive pandas eat a more diverse diet that includes fruit and milk they tended to harbour similar microbe species in their guts.
Wei's team found that samples from both groups contained previously unknown genes produced by Clostridium bacteria,
The microbial enzymes may help giant pandas to extract extra energy from the small amount of bamboo that they manage to process
and pseudo-thumbs, bones that allow them to grip plant stalks that help pandas to live on bamboo,
despite having a carnivore's digestive system, he says. But Ruth Ley, a microbiologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New york, says that pandas still harbour fewer cellulose-digesting enzymes than even non-exclusively herbivorous species such as humans.
I see a very badly adapted animal, she says. The main way the panda has adapted to the low-quality diet is not via microbiota
like the vast majority of other animals, but by eating 15 hours per day.
Ancient greek ships carried more than just wine: Nature Newsa DNA analysis of ancient storage jars suggests that Greek sailors traded a wide range of foods not just wine,
as many historians have assumed. The study, in press at the Journal of Archaeological Science1, finds evidence of vegetables,
herbs and nuts in nine jars taken from Mediterranean shipwrecks. The researchers say DNA testing of underwater artefacts from different time periods could help to reveal how such complex markets developed across the Mediterranean.
It warns that up to 1. 6 million animals might be used in toxicity tests for the 4
and reduce the amount of weeds and harmful pests such as the rice planthopper. This invasive insect has the potential to devastate entire rice fields an outbreak in Thailand last year destroyed four per cent of the country's harvest.
By regulating the amount of nitrogen in the ecosystem, the practice also minimised the need for applying fertiliser.
And insects attracted to the plants provided extra food for the fish. More from Scidev.
One author of the report, Tekalign Mamo, Ethiopia's minister of state for agriculture and rural development, told Nature that policy-makers at Durban should take examples of good agricultural practice
As well as Beddington and Mamo, they include Carlos Nobre, a climate scientist at Brazil's National Institute for Space Research in S £o Paulo,
no alignment of the animals and of their herds along geomagnetic field lines could be found."
"Sheep, horses, hay bales, rocks, cows with unsatisfactory resolution, cows near a track, settlement or feeder, were taken not in the analysis. SÃ nke Johnsen, who studies magneto-reception at Duke university in Durham,
Burda s team is already looking at magneto-reception in other animals
Seven days: 4 10 november 2011: Nature Newsresearch Events Business People Policy Trend Watch Coming up Number crunch Research Fracking tremors A British energy company says that its hydraulic fracturing('fracking')project probably caused the cluster of small earthquakes
Asteroid fly-by Marshalling everything from major radar facilities to backyard telescopes, astronomers geared up this week for a fantastic view of an asteroid called 2005 YU55.
How mammoths lost the extinction lottery: Nature Newswoolly mammoths, woolly rhinos and other large animals driven to extinction
since the last ice age each succumbed to a different lethal mix of circumstances. This conclusion the result of a huge analysis of fossils, climate records and DNA hints that it could be more difficult than thought to identify the species at greatest risk of disappearing today.
But there was no clear pattern to explain why the animals died off and it proved impossible to predict from habitat
we would have woolly mammoths and no reindeer, so Santa would drag his sleigh with woolly mammoths.
Fifty thousand years ago, no fewer than 150 genera of large animals roamed the planet,
including woolly mammoths, giant sloths and cave bears. Within 40 000 years two-thirds of them were gone.
Some scientists, noting that modern humans were spreading throughout the world around this time, envisaged a blitzkrieg in which technologically savvy people hunted these animals to extinction.
The end of an ice age and the habitat changes it wrought led other researchers to lay the blame on climate.
because researchers often used different methods and different animals spread around the world to draw general conclusions about megafaunal extinctions.
For a more consistent picture, he and his colleagues charted the population dynamics of woolly mammoths
woolly rhinos, wild horses, reindeer, steppe bison and musk ox. The researchers created a series of snapshots of the European,
Asian and North american ranges of these animals (drawn from climate records and hundreds of fossils) and a rough approximation of their population size (based on ancient MITOCHONDRIAL DNA sequences) between 42,000 and 6, 000 thousand years ago.
As the climate subsequently warmed, woolly rhinos woolly mammoths and the Eurasian populations of musk oxen went extinct as populations became more and more isolated from one another.
But these extinctions happened thousands of years apart, and the animals'ranges changed in different ways.
For instance, woolly rhinos roamed much of Europe and Asia until their extinction around 14,000 years ago,
whereas the mammoths'range inched northward until they disappeared around 4, 000 years ago. Humans are off the hook for some extirpations,
but still suspected in others. Musk-ox remains are rarely found at sites where humans lived, for example,
Wild horses, on the other hand, lived across Europe and Asia until very recently, and two-thirds of European and Siberian archaeological sites contain their bones,
And woolly mammoths reproduced slowly, whereas reindeer are more fecund, almost like a rodent, she says.
The team found no way to predict the future extinction of a species, based on either an animal's genetic diversity or the size of its range.
Had I been around 20 000 to 35,000 years ago I would have predicted that reindeer would go extinct
while Eurasian musk ox would do well, Willerslev says. This could mean that it will be difficult to determine which modern species are at greatest risk of extinction,
when applied to modern extinctions of much smaller animals, and even plants. It's interesting
what happened to the mammoth, he says. But when we think about species today, megafauna represent a minute fraction of the fauna we have.
Citizen scientists'climate-impact survey wraps upone of the biggest citizen-science projects ever conducted concludes this monthafter five years of data collection.
Chimp research Most biomedical research on chimpanzees is"unnecessary, the US Institute of Medicine found in a report released on 15 december.
The report means that research using chimps that is funded by the US government will be curtailed sharply.
where director Francis Collins said that"something like 50%of the agency's roughly 37 projects involving chimps would be phased out
F. KRAUSTINIEST frogs This tiny adult female frog (Paedophryne dekot) is the world's smallest tetrapod, according to Fred Kraus at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu
) Just 8. 5-9. 0 millimetres long from snout to vent about a millimetre shorter than other tiny frog species the amphibian was found living in leaf litter
A large number of diminutive frogs live in the region, which Kraus says may be a biological oddity.
However, he also points out that miniature frogs are hard to find in the field,
marine mammals and other sometimes controversial topics, prohibits agency employees from distorting science and protects the rights of NOAA scientists to speak openly about their work
such as a flood at a power plant or the loss of crops due to pests. Jim Hall, director of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford, UK,
allow health organizations to monitor birds and other animals for the mutations that would provide an early warning of a pandemic
and enable authorities to act quickly to contain the virus. That claim is meeting with scepticism,
found that just five mutations allowed avian H5n1 to spread easily among ferrets, which are a good proxy for how flu behaves in other mammals,
including humans. All five mutations have been spotted individually although not together in wild viruses. Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his colleagues have submitted similar work to Nature,
and avian viruses, creating opportunities for genetic reassortment in co-infected animals. Fouchier argues that many countries collect more and more-timely,
or mammals, may be better than no warnings at all. But even if a candidate pandemic H5n1 virus was detected in poultry,
The relative ease of making H5n1 transmissible between mammals in the lab should now prompt the world to address these glaring inadequacies in surveillance
Pieter Tans and his team at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric administration s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, measure greenhouse-gas plumes from major facilities through a network
and journalist Brian Deer over a string of articles that branded him a fraud (F. Godlee et al.
restrict veterinary surgeons to using the two cephalosporin drugs specifically approved for food-producing animals ceftiofur and cephapirin and ban prophylactic use.
In animals not listed in the FDA order, such as ducks or rabbits, vets will have more discretion to use the drugs.
Most antibiotic classes are used both in animals and in humans, so the FDA is also considering tightening controls on all classes of antimicrobials used on farms.
Andrew Weaver and Neil Swart, both climate scientists at the University of Victoria in British columbia, listened to the rhetoric and decided to run some calculations.
Weaver says.""And frankly, these numbers aren t as big as I thought they would be.
Weaver and Swart tried to answer this question in a recent commentary in Nature Climate Change1.
However, such a life-cycle comparison is included not in Weaver and Swart s analysis, owing to the complexity of assessing future technological changes for this and other fuels.
which are deadly to both horses and humans. Her research requires the highest level of biological security containment BSL-4
but no BSL-4 labs in the United states can accommodate horses, so she collaborates with researchers in Australia."
"If we want to protect large animals from these infections, then we have to test vaccines in them,
The National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF) in Manhattan, Kansas, is designed to provide BSL-4 containment for large-animal studies
The site is adjacent to the KSU Biosecurity Research Institute, a BSL-3 facility that studies animal and plant pathogens.
A second is the risk of animal-borne diseases spreading to humans as population growth and dispersal puts people into greater contact with wild animals.
The third is the potential for global warming to expand the range of insect-borne diseases."
the peat forest contained trees that looked like feather dusters, with trunks twice the height of telephone poles;
lack of data, says Ian Brown, head of avian virology and mammalian influenza at the Animal health and Veterinary Laboratories Agency lab in Weybridge, UK.
Nature analysed the records of nonidentical sequences from all subtypes of avian and pig flu deposited in the US National Center for Biotechnology Information s Influenza Virus Sequence Database between 2003 and 2011.
The 2007 peak in avian viral sampling was largely the result of surveys of more than 100,000 wild birds to monitor for the arrival of H5n1 in the Americas1,
The Influenza Genome Sequencing Project is also helping by generating vast quantities of sequences it now accounts for half of all avian
The two agencies responsible for monitoring disease outbreaks in animals the Food and agriculture organization (FAO) of the United nations and the World organisation for Animal health (OIE) stipulate that sequences of potentially zoonotic viruses should be deposited in public databases within 3 months
The size of a country s poultry population is no predictor of how many samples that country will generate (see Many birds, few samples.
which are often close to wild ducks and other flu reservoirs.""Proper geographic representation is lacking, says van der Werf,
Monitoring animals falls to the FAO, which tends to focus on food security, and the OIE, which looks mostly at animal health and trade.
The genetic make-up of one individual a female farmer known as GÃ k4 bears a startling similarity to that of modern-day Mediterraneans.
which make up the lion s share of the food consumed around the world. Cereals and vegetables need lots of nitrogen to grow,
A bloody boon for conservationbloodsucking leeches are offering the best hope of finding one of the world s rarest animals.
Conservationists are now planning to trawl tropical leeches for saola DNA. Prompted by research published this week2 showing that the bloodsuckers can store DNA from their meals for several months,
the saola search is at the vanguard of an approach to gauging biodiversity that could prove much more efficient than conventional methods.
Rather than setting out camera traps the idea is to collect and sequence DNA left in the environment, in everything from soil to leeches stomachs."
"I am almost sure that in ten years all the research on biodiversity will be done with DNA,
only for the animal to die after a few days in captivity. In 2011, Vietnam established a small saola reserve in the animal s only known habitat,
Their team failed to find the saola using camera traps and considered bringing in trained dogs to help the hunt, at an estimated cost of US$400,
000.""I, to a large extent, had given up on finding a survey method that would be useful in time to save the species,
describing his experiments with leeches. Gilbert, his colleague Mads Bertelsen and their team had fed goat blood to medicinal leeches (Hirudo spp.
something that is"a lot harder than it sounds, says Gilbert. The team resorted to tempting the creatures with blood-filled condoms warmed under a heat-lamp,
and putting the leeches into syringes attached to blood-filled test tubes sealed by a thin film.
After killing the leeches over the course of several months, the team identified goat DNA in every one of them.
Gilbert asked Wilkinson to ship him some tropical leeches (Haemadipsa spp.).Wilkinson collected them on the Vietnamese side of the Annamite Range
but 21 of the 25 leeches they tested contained DNA from other mammals, including the Truong Son muntjac deer (Muntiacus truongsonensis) and the Annamite striped rabbit (Nesolagus timinsi),
which was discovered only a decade ago. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists both species as data deficient because scientists know so little about their populations or habitat.
what animals are in the area, says Gilbert. Leeches are impossible to avoid in tropical forests,
and they can be collected by the dozen by simply peeling them off intrepid researchers clothes.
The plummeting cost of DNA sequencing makes leech surveys cheap, and DNA from hundreds of the animals could be combined
and analysed in a single experiment. The method is unlikely to provide information about an animal s population,
but leeches should help to pin down its range. The Vietnam field trial suggests that leeches preserve DNA from only their most recent blood meal
so an animal s range is likely to include the location where the leech was found.
Surveying leech blood is just one of many ways to collect environmental DNA that have emerged in recent years.
In the Molecular Ecology special issue, various research teams worked out the diet of a leopard by sequencing DNA in its faeces3;
tracked earthworm communities in soil4; and reconstructed ancient Siberian habitats from DNA preserved in permafrost5.
Meanwhile, Australian scientists have found DNA from critically endangered species and potentially toxic plants in traditional Chinese medicines6.
His team found that DNA surveys of water samples from a Canadian river identified the same invertebrate species as visual surveys7.
short DNA sequences that uniquely identify a species. Bar-coding makes it possible to distinguish between two species of butterfly, for example,
In Vientiane last month, leeches were the talk of the IUCN s Saola Working group meeting. Wilkinson says that the group hopes to offer rewards to villagers who bring in leeches with saola DNA,
Wilkinson and his colleagues at the WWF plan to gather leeches from the Vietnamese side of the Annamites
and the Wildlife Conservation Society in New york intends to include leeches in its upcoming surveys of Laos."Everyone is excited, unsurprisingly,
but it s a very promising method for finding it and pretty much any other mammal in the forest
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