while offering insights into forest health and diversity. The team's work combines physics biochemistry and ecology, beginning with measuring subtle differences in the way the forest canopy absorbs
a decades-old law intended to safeguard against plant pathogens from overseas. Previous types of GM plants are covered
because they they were made using plant pathogens. The bacterium Agrobacterium tumefaciens which can cause tumours on plants shuttled foreign genes into plant genomes.
Developers then used genetic control elements derived from pathogenic plant viruses such as the cauliflower mosaic virus to switch on the genes.
says Johan Botterman, head of product research at Bayer Bioscience in Ghent, Belgium. The technique is established well for many crops,
) Bayer is interested in harnessing other enzymes called'meganucleases'to do the same type of targeted engineering,
measuring contamination levels and assessing the long-term threat. Their first results, to appear in the Japanese journal Radioisotopes in August,
with combined levels of caesium-134 and caesium-137 ranging from thousands to about 1 Â million Bq kg-1. But leaves that unfolded afterwards were largely free of contamination.
Without data on the true depth of soil contamination, local schools are using large machines to scoop up the top 50 Â centimetres of soil probably much more than is necessary
making the plant produce toxins that confer resistance to some insect pests. A Bt cotton variety is being developed for Kenyan farmers at KARI.
Once a product has been released for 20 years with no reported risks to human health and the environment
Biotechnology has the potential to help solve some agricultural and health problems in Kenya. So it should be harnessed,
The most important finding of the consortium's initial analysis is the identification of more than 800 disease-resistance genes, each
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.
especially in developing countries, says Sarah Gurr, a molecular plant pathologist at the University of Oxford, UK,
Most of the people in the group are now asking how we can use information from the sequencing to learn about some of the traits we work on, such as disease resistance, tuber dormancy,
Nature Newskey weapons in the fight against malaria, pyrethroid insecticides, are losing their edge. Over the past decade, billions of dollars have been spent on distributing long-lasting pyrethroid-treated bed nets and on indoor spraying.
where most malaria deaths occur, these efforts have reduced greatly the disease's toll. 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, and also of resistance in new places, says Jo Lines, an entomological epidemiologist and head of vector control at the Global Malaria Programme of the World health organization (WHO) in Geneva,
Switzerland. THE WHO now intends to launch a global strategy to tackle the problem by the end of the year.
Pyrethroids are the mainstay of malaria control because they are safe, cheap, effective and long-lasting.
says Robert Newman, director of the Global Malaria Programme. The international community has been slow to respond to the threat despite warnings
says Janet Hemingway, director of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, UK, and chief executive of the nonprofit Innovative Vector Control Consortium, a public-private venture set up in 2005 to develop new insecticides and monitoring tools.
'But Lines says that the malaria-control community felt too many lives were at stake to let the threat of resistance stand in the way of massively scaling up the bed-net and spraying campaigns.
Teasing out the impact of resistance on the success of malaria-control interventions is difficult
Malaria-control programmes often lack insect-resistance monitoring, and detection of all forms of resistance is not easy.
Ultimately, entirely new classes of insecticides particularly those that can be applied to bed nets are needed to alleviate the dependence of malaria-control efforts on pyrethroids.
Research targeting mosquito control is compared grossly underfunded with that on malaria drugs and vaccines she adds,
health and education that is maintained by the government. Andelman says that all the data she collects can be broken down to the level of individual households,
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.
Researchers hope that by studying how the viruses jump to people they can come up with ways to limit the spread of disease without culling the bats
Andrew Cunningham, a wildlife epidemiologist at the Institute of Zoology in London, and his colleagues fear that the next big epidemic could come from henipaviruses,
which can cause fatal encephalitis or respiratory disease in humans. There is no vaccination to protect against Hendra virus or Nipah virus, the two established species of henipavirus.
We are concerned the solution will be to just kill the bats to control the virus, says Cunningham.
We need to find another way that protects bats and people at the same time. Spread of infection from bats to humans is an increasing problem in Asia and Africa
in part because people are living in closer contact with bats than ever before. As forest habitats are destroyed,
their protected status. Zoonotic spill over only occurs where you have contact, says Peter Hudson, a wildlife epidemiologist at Pennsylvania State university in State College.
As urbanization spreads we become more exposed. Conservation and disease must be managed together. Cunningham and his team started investigating the risk from henipaviruses five years ago.
The viruses were thought then to be restricted to Asia and Australasia 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.
The expanded virus range is cause for alarm, says James wood, a veterinary researcher at the University of Cambridge, UK,
For example, a colony of more than half a million bats lives in the roof of a major hospital in Accra.
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.
All this adds up to a potentially disastrous public-health problem in West Africa, says Cunningham and one that is currently not recognized
because doctors are unlikely to be looking for it and may misdiagnose it as cerebral malaria.
Cunningham says it's too early to say for sure how many people are infected with the viruses in Ghana.
In a paper published on 22 september in Plos ONE, the team reports finding antibodies against members of the Henipavirus genus in 5%of 97 pigs studied.
This is the first step along the line to a public-health threat. Wood agrees. I would be surprised
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, researchers need a deeper understanding of the triggers for such spill over events.
Science enters desert debate: Nature Newsa desert may need no defining, but desertification is not so easy to pin down.
including poverty and child malnutrition, can drive these processes. They also need to learn how best to track desertification using satellite data.
But M. giganteus is a headache in the lab. Its genome has few markers to help would-be breeders keep track of desirable genes,
The 22-23 Â September meeting, hosted by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase,
and labelled with claims that consuming these microorganisms can be good for your health. But a study published today shows that such yoghurts have only subtle effects on the bacteria already in the gut
and asked one in each pair to eat twice-daily servings of a popular yoghurt brand containing five strains of bacteria.
Mcnulty also fed the five bacterial strains from the yoghurt to'gnotobiotic'mice animals raised
One of the five yoghurt strains Bifidobacterium animalis lactis also showed a similar boost in its ability to metabolize carbohydrates.
which was funded by the US National institutes of health and Danone Research, the research arm of the food company that makes some probiotic yoghurts,
Companies that sell foods with added ingredients that are intended to boost health or prevent illness are under increasing pressure to substantiate the claims about their products.
The pressure was increased earlier this year when the European Food safety Agency criticized many products, following an extensive three-year review.
The health claims are hard to test, says Gordon, because there is so much variety in the bacteria in the yoghurts
Antibody offers hope for multiple sclerosis treatment: Nature Newsthe first drug to show signs of not just halting multiple sclerosis (MS),
but actually reversing the nerve damage caused by the condition, has taken a significant step towards clinical approval.
The results of a phase III trial, presented on 22 october at the 5th Joint Triennial Congress of the European and Americas Committees for Treatment and Research in Multiple sclerosis,
in Amsterdam, found that 78%of patients treated with the monoclonal antibody alemtuzumab remained free from relapse after two years and half the relapse rate of one of the standard therapies,
interferon à Â-1a (marketed as Rebif, among other names. However, alemtuzumab did not perform quite as well as it had in earlier trials1.
There was some evidence that it had reversed damage to nerves, but the result was not statistically significant,
and the UK chief investigator of the Comparison of Alemtuzumab and Rebif Efficacy in Multiple sclerosis (CARE-MS) I trial.
Coles told the meeting that magnetic resonance imaging showed that subjects taking alemtuzumab had lost also less brain volume than those taking Rebif, a proxy measure for overall tissue damage.
Just 8%of patients taking alemtuzumab experienced a worsening in disability according to standard measures, in comparison with 11%taking Rebif.
The patients recruited in this trial showed very little worsening of disability, he says. Ludwig Kappos, chair of neurology at the University Hospital of Basel in Switzerland, who has been involved in several MS drug trials,
says he is disappointed that there was no significant effect on disability progression. This is in contrast to
what the phase II study has shown, he says. But he expects this effect to show up in another ongoing phase III trial:
There is no cure for MS, a condition caused by the body's own immune system attacking the myelin sheath that normally protects the nerves and speeds up neurological signals in the brain and spinal cord.
At the moment, the only treatments are drugs such as interferon à Â-1a and glatiramer acetate (Copaxone), both
of which merely slow the progression of the disease. But alemtuzumab has the potential to reverse it:
the drug tackles the mechanisms that cause damage to cells by effectively resetting the immune system.
The drug brings an increased risk of autoimmune diseases. In the trial, 18.1%of people taking alemtuzumab experienced thyroid-related autoimmune responses,
and 0. 8%developed the potentially life-threatening condition immune thrombocytopenia. But, says Coles, these findings mirror those from earlier trials,
and it is possible to identify those patients most at risk by screening for certain biomarkers.
Some patients and clinicians who have already got wind of the alemtuzumab's efficacy seem unwilling to wait for clinical approval
The drug is approved already in many countries as a treatment for some forms of leukaemia and lymphoma, under the name Campath.
it is legal to prescribe any drug for off-label use, and so patients have started already using it to treat MS,
he says. But it is not just MS patients who have been holding their breath over this drug,
says Funtleyder. Earlier this year, Genzyme, a drug company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that makes alemtuzumab
and a range of other therapies, was acquired by Paris-based drug-maker Sanofi. The value of the deal for Genzyme's shareholders is contingent on the success of alemtuzumab in treating MS;
the first milestone is for the drug to gain approval from the US Food and Drug Administration before the end of March 2014.
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.
or medicines, says Foley. This opens up an entirely new view of this early market,
and increased research to rule out health risks stemming from the bean. Nodari, a former member of CTNBIO who has questioned long transgenic crops,
whereas some other GM CROPS produce unfamiliar proteins that could in theory cause an allergic reaction when eaten, the GM pinto bean produces only small snippets of RNA,
Arag £o hopes that the strain will not only boost yields, but also enable planting on as much as 200,
ruling that the government must prove that the crop poses major health or environmental risks.
BUSINESSVIOXX fines Drug-maker Merck will pay US$950 million to settle investigations into how it marketed the painkiller Vioxx,
had to pull the blockbuster arthritis drug from the market in 2004, after five years of sales.
In 2007 it agreed to pay $4. 85 billion to settle nearly 27,000 lawsuits that claimed the medicine had caused heart attacks and strokes.
Merck had set aside the money in the third quarter of 2010. Lipitor patent ends The world's best-selling drug, Pfizer's cholesterol-lowering medication Lipitor (atorvastatin) now faces competition from generics,
after it lost patent protection on 30 november. The drug has brought in more than US$100 billion in sales for the pharma company,
based in New york, which has had to slash research and development funding as it tries to make up for the expected loss in income.
and found basic information missing on chemicals'developmental and reproductive toxicity. It warns that up to 1. 6 million animals might be used in toxicity tests for the 4
599 substances registered so far. Provisional findings were reported in July (see Nature 475,150-151; 2011).
Anti-HIV gel fails An antiretroviral gel that seemed able to prevent sexual transmission of HIV to uninfected women has failed in a follow-up study.
The Microbicide Trials Network said on 25 november that it would drop the use of vaginal tenofovir gel from the VOICE study involving 5, 029 HIV-negative women in South africa,
Zimbabwe and Uganda after a routine data review found that it was no better than placebo at preventing HIV.
2010), the gel had cut the incidence of HIV by up to 54%.%Trials of tenofovir tablets in the VOICE study have failed also (see Nature 478,10-11;
Fish significantly lower the risk of rice sheath blast disease and reduce the amount of weeds and harmful pests such as the rice planthopper.
and warnings of death and disease every time they pull out a packet of cigarettes. But from December 2012, the warnings will be bigger, more gruesome and on a monochrome paper backing.
combined with large text health warnings, will take up over 75%of the surface of the packet.
says Simon Chapman, a public-health scientist at the University of Sydney. He says that no other product has had ever its packaging regulated so systematically by the government.
Australian public-health experts hope that taking away this means of promotion and making the packets highly unattractive will deter nonsmokers,
In its Report on the Global Tobacco Epidemic, 20111, the World health organization provides statistics from multiple countries showing that packet warnings,
The chief executive of the nongovernmental cancer-control organization Cancer Council Australia, Ian Olver, says that the fact that the tobacco industry is opposed vehemently to the legislation is a good indication that the industry's market research has shown also that plain packaging will reduce its customer base.
Smoking-related diseases kill around 15,000 Australians a year and a 2009 report3 by the Western Australian Cancer Council estimated that tobacco use cost Australia more than $31 billion in 2004-05.
This greatly outweighs the $5. 6 billion or so the country receives in annual tax revenue from tobacco sales.
The predicted health and economic benefits of plain packaging have garnered all-party support for the plan in the Australian parliament,
Australian health minister Nicola Roxon has said repeatedly that the government will go ahead with the plan despite the threats."
The US Food and Drug Administration had planned to mandate graphic health warnings on packets from September 2012,
so health agencies and governments will be watching closely to see whether it has significant public-health effects,
and what political and legal battles ensue
The mystery of the magnetic cowse. ELISSEEVA/GLOWIMAGES. COMCATTLE seem to align with magnetic field lines,
Back from'Mars'Six men have survived 520 days cooped up in 3 small rooms at the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow
Business Avandia fine Drug giant Glaxosmithkline (GSK) announced on 3 november that it has agreed to pay US$3 billion to settle a bevy of US federal investigations into the way it has developed
and marketed some of its biggest-selling drugs. Foremost among these is Avandia (rosiglitazone), a once-dominant diabetes drug, sales
of which were banned in Europe and restricted in the United states last year after concerns that it increased risks of heart attack and stroke.
The company, headquartered in London, came under fire in July 2010, when a US Senate committee concluded that GSK had known about the drug's heart risks for more than a decade without reporting them to regulators.
See go. nature. com/ifphvp for more. People SLAC head leaves Persis Drell is stepping down as the director of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park
and Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. Policy Drug approvals rise The US Food and Drug Administration approved more innovative drugs this year than in any year of the past decade,
except for 2009, the agency said last week. In the US government's fiscal year 2011,
the agency approved 35 original medicines, 24 of which were authorized in the United states before anywhere else.
or'orphan',diseases and two were'personalized'medicines: treatments for melanoma and lung cancer that were approved along with diagnostic tests to identify the patients that they are most likely to help.
Public integrity More US agency policies on scientific integrity seem likely to become public after John Holdren 墉 director of the White house Office of Science
and Technology Policy (OSTP) 墉 encouraged officials to release the tightly guarded guidelines. In a 31 october letter, Holdren said he had set a 17 december deadline for agencies to submit revised policies that take account of OSTP feedback on earlier drafts.
Future medicine The US National Research Council (NRC) has called for a network that would connect patients'health records with layers of data on molecular tests, genetics,
would enable treatments to be personalized for patients, ushering in a new taxonomy of human disease based on molecular origins rather than on physical signs and symptoms.
The report was requested last year by the National institutes of health. See go. nature. com/ayesl2 for more.
Trend Watch Efforts to eradicate polio are bearing fruit in India, one of four countries (with Nigeria,
other countries in which polio still persists have had already more cases than this time last year (see chart.
¢â presents recommendations for avoiding future food crises. ccafs. cgiar. org/commission Number crunch $131 bn Lifetime sales of Pfizer's cholesterol-lowering drug
Lipitor (atorvastatin), the world's top-selling prescription medicine. It loses patent protection from 30 november.
Reuters, IMS Health Â
How mammoths lost the extinction lottery: Nature Newswoolly mammoths, woolly rhinos and other large animals driven to extinction
'such as medicine and food. Results from the survey published earlier this year1 show that about one-third of such forests are vulnerable to climate change.
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.
The report was accepted immediately by the US National institutes of health, where director Francis Collins said that"something like 50%of the agency's roughly 37 projects involving chimps would be phased out
Variome project A project to log all the genetic variations that cause disease in humans took a step forward last week with the launch of its Chinese arm at a meeting in Beijing.
and share it in international databases of genes and diseases. China is taking on about a quarter of the project's estimated 20
Preventing HIV Pharmaceutical firm Gilead Sciences wants to sell anti-HIV drugs to healthy people,
and Drug Administration to sell its two-in-one antiretroviral medication Truvada (emtricitabine/tenofovir disoproxil fumarate) to people not infected with HIV.
Such'pre-exposure prophylaxis'(Prep) has been supported by clinical trials (see Nature 476 260-261; 2011).
) The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, is currently working on guidelines for administering Prep
and monitoring patients who are taking the therapy. Amgen shake-up Two top executives at the biotechnology giant Amgen are leaving after more than a decade in charge,
the company said on 15 december. Chief executive Kevin Sharer and head of research and development Roger Perlmutter are replaced both retiring
respectively by chief operating officer Robert Bradway and chief medical officer Sean Harper. Amgen, based in Thousand Oaks,
California, posted US$15. 1 billion in sales last year; its products include biological drugs for rheumatoid arthritis and anaemia.
SOURCE: GTM RES.//SEIAUS solar-energy installations spiked during the third quarter of 2011, according to a joint report by the Solar energy Industries Association in WASHINGTON DC and GTM Research, headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts.
9 15 december 2011gene-therapy boost A gene therapy treatment for patients with the blood-clotting disorder haemophilia B has scored its first unequivocal success,
scientists at University college London reported at the American Society of Hematology meeting in San diego, California, on 11 december (A c. Nathwani et al.
) Haemophilia B is caused by mutations in the gene that codes for the factor IX protein;
the treatment uses viruses to deliver a healthy version of the gene to patients'liver cells.
In a previous trial, protein production dropped below therapeutic levels after two months (C. S. Manno et al.
) But in the latest trial, four out of six patients were still making the protein up to 18 months after one treatment,
and did need not injections of blood-clotting factors. Targeting cancer Efforts to create cancer therapies tailored to a patient's genetic make-up were boosted by promising clinical-trial results reported on 7 december (J. Baselga et al.
N. Engl. J. Med. http://doi. org/g8m; 2011). ) The trial was conducted on women with advanced forms of breast cancer that involved mutations in the HER2 gene,
which drives about 20%of breast-cancer cases. Those given the experimental monoclonal antibody pertuzumab and the widely used drug trastuzumab (Herceptin), together with chemotherapy, gained an extra 6-month lull in disease progression compared with women receiving only chemotherapy and trastuzumab.
Both antibodies target the protein affected by HER2 mutations. See go. nature. com/hwxlbd for more.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/ASUEVENTS Fresh clue to ancient Mars water NASA's Opportunity rover has discovered veins of hydrothermally deposited minerals at the edge of Endeavour crater on Mars. The bright
stick-like veins (pictured), apparently comprised of gypsum, show that hot, mineral-rich water once pulsed through fractures in the volcanic rock.
Gypsum deposits can form in water that is much less acidic than required by the water-altered sulphate minerals previously discovered on Mars meaning that the site could have been more habitable than others explored by the rover.
the US Department of health and human services'Office of Research Integrity (ORI) named David Wright as its permanent director on 5 december.
Moshe Yaniv, a geneticist at the Pasteur institute, and Jean Rossier, a neurobiologist at ESPCI Paristech.
a developmental endocrinologist at the National Museum of Natural history in Paris. Policy Durban deal After negotiations that ran into the early morning, tired politicians at the climate talks in Durban,
) On 7 december, the Court of appeals for the District of columbia circuit (one level below the Supreme court) set a date of 23 april 2012 to hear an appeal from the plaintiffs in the case, James Sherley, of the Boston Biomedical Research Institute in Massachusetts,
Pill politics In a surprise move, the US Secretary of health and human services, Kathleen Sebelius, has overruled the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and denied girls under 17 access to the emergency contraceptive levonorgestrel known as the morning-after pill,
or Plan B unless it is prescribed by a physician. Drug-makers Teva had asked that the pill be made available over the counter to girls,
and FDA research had found it to be safe and effective. But Sebelius said on 7 december that she did not believe the pill could be used safely by the youngest girls of reproductive age.
See go. nature. com/w3343o for more. Fisheries push The United nations has stepped up a push to encourage sustainable fisheries.
Its general assembly on 6 december adopted a draft resolution that urges nations to reduce or eliminate by-catch
NHGRITREND watch The US National Human genome Research Institute (NHGRI) announced a four-year plan on 6 december that focuses heavily on the use of genome sequences in the clinic.
the hope is that patients will routinely undergo sequencing for medical purposes. See go. nature. com/jhjz2l for more details of the NHGRI programme.
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011