and with the contamination proving to be isolated an event, imports into South korea have resumed. But as an army of combines marches across the wheat fields of eastern Oregon, the mystery of the transgenic intruders is fresh in the minds of investigators at the US Department of agriculture (USDA),
USDA, MONSANTOMONSANTO had shipped MON71800 seed to breeders around the country for crossing with commercial varieties optimized for each region s climate, day length and disease profile.
Now, the USDA investigators are sifting through hundreds of markers to try to match the genetic signature of the contaminant Oregon wheat with one of the varieties from the 256 field tests registered with the USDA.
says Michael Firko, the head of biotechnology regulation at the USDA s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.
or variations in the number of copies of a repeated sequence that are unique to the various strains of wheat."
Monsanto has made already clear its favoured explanation for the contamination: sabotage.""There are folks who don t like biotechnology
Fraley argues that the distribution of the contaminant plants suggests that a human hand cast them there.
If, for example, the contaminant was a spring wheat plant in a winter wheat field, the transgenic wheat would flower
Rinderpest research restartsresearch is set to resume on the rinderpest virus, the cause of a deadly cattle disease that was declared eradicated in 2011
and has been off limits for study ever since. The moratorium part of efforts to guard against accidental or intentional release of virus that could reintroduce the disease was lifted on 10 july
and replaced by a new international oversight system for such research. In its heyday, the disease the only one other than smallpox to be eradicated from nature killed hundreds of millions of cattle, mainly in Europe, Asia and Africa
often leaving famine in its wake. Under the new oversight system, run by the Food and agriculture organization of the united nations (FAO) in Rome and the Paris-based World organisation for Animal health (OIE),
whether vaccines developed against a closely related virus peste des petits ruminants (PPR), which causes disease in sheep
and goats might also protect cattle against rinderpest. Led by Michael Baron, a rinderpest researcher at the Pirbright Institute in Pirbright, UK, the project,
if successful, would eliminate the need to retain stocks of live-attenuated rinderpest vaccine. That would contribute to the goal of reducing the number of labs worldwide holding rinderpest material,
thus decreasing the risk of reintroduction. Some 55 labs in 35 countries still hold some kind of rinderpest virus,
according to a 2011 survey published in January 2013 in the journal Emerging Infectious diseases: 37%of them in Asia, 29%in Africa and 26%in Europe (G. Fourniã et al.
Emerging Infect. Dis. http://doi. org/m7w; 2013). ) The identities of the labs remain confidential.
The most dangerous stocks are of live field strains of virus, estimated to be kept in at least 16 labs in 14 countries,
and samples of blood and tissues from infected herds, kept in at least 10 labs in 10 countries.
Stocks of live-attenuated vaccine, currently held in at least 53 labs in 34 countries, are deemed less problematic,
although some could, in theory, revert to disease-causing forms. The FAO and the OIE hope to eventually reduce the number of sites holding live wild viruses to a handful of officially designated labs
ideally located outside regions where accidental releases could have devastating consequences, says David Ulaeto, a virologist and member of the joint advisory committee.
Conversely, the agencies plan to centralize stocks of vaccines in a few high-containment repositories in regions at highest risk of disease,
so that they can be deployed within hours of any confirmed recurrence of rinderpest. No siting decisions have been made,
"Many countries are reluctant to give up their vaccine stocks. The process of destroying virus or shipping it to centres with high biosafety levels must be done in a way that does not risk its release,
Many countries are reluctant to give up their vaccine stocks in case the disease should reappear and threaten their food supply.
They worry about becoming dependent on the willingness of the international community to swiftly provide them with needed vaccines."
and that they would have guaranteed access to vaccine from FAO-OIE repositories. Vallat notes that
if Baron proves that PPR vaccines can protect cattle against rinderpest, it would provide an elegant way around such political issues:
there would no longer be need any to hold onto rinderpest vaccines. Baron says that he hopes to start the vaccine-challenge trials next spring
and complete them by the end of 2014. Additional potentially promising research areas include other improved vaccines,
diagnostics and perhaps disease pathology, says Lubroth. He stresses, however, that the advisory committee will not be prescriptive
but open to considering any research ideas put forward by scientists
EU debates U-turn on biofuels policythe European union (EU) has spent the past 10 years nurturing a  15-billion (US$20-billion) industry that makes transport fuel from food crops such as soya beans
Flu vaccine backfires in pigspreventing seasonal sniffles may be complicated more than researchers suspected. A vaccine that protects piglets from one common influenza virus also makes them more vulnerable to a rarer flu strain,
researchers report today in Science Translational Medicine1. The team gave piglets a vaccine against H1n2 influenza.
The animals responded by making antibodies that blocked that virus but aided infection with the swine flu H1n1,
which caused a pandemic among humans in 2009. In the study, H1n1 infected more cells
and caused more severe pneumonia in vaccinated piglets than unvaccinated ones. The root of the different immune responses lies with the mushroom-shaped haemagglutinin protein found on the outside of influenza-virus particles
which helps them to attach onto cells in the airways. The protein occurs in all types of flu,
but the make-up of its cap and stem vary between strains. In the study, a vaccine for H1n2 spurred pigs to produce antibodies that bound the cap and the stem of that virus s haemagglutinin.
But some of those antibodies also targeted the stem of H1n1 s haemagglutinin protein, helping that virus fuse to cell membranes.
That made H1n1 more efficient at infecting pigs and causing disease. The finding may give some vaccine developers pause.
Much of the work to develop a universal flu vaccine has targeted the stems of haemagglutinin proteins
because they are relatively consistent across many types of influenza viruses. The new study suggests that such vaccines could also produce antibodies that enhance the ability of some viruses to infect new hosts,
says James Crowe, an immunologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. But that does not mean that researchers should stop developing novel flu vaccines,
including those that target haemagglutinin stems, he adds.""We should be very careful. Gary Nabel, a flu-vaccine researcher and chief scientific officer at the biotechnology firm Sanofi in Cambridge, Massachusetts, agrees."
"It raises a warning flag, but at the same time it provides a tool to manage that risk,
he says of the new study's results and methods. Still, researchers have not yet tested whether human influenza vaccines can produce the same effect.
And differences between pigs and humans make it difficult to interpret how relevant the findings are to the development of human vaccines,
says Sarah Gilbert, a vaccine researcher at the University of Oxford, UK. Lead author Hana Golding, a microbiologist at the US Food and Drug Administration in Bethesda, Maryland, agrees
and stresses that seasonal vaccines are still safe and effective.""This has no relevance to the regular vaccinations,
she says.""We think that people should definitely take them
Overpumping threatens to deplete US high plains groundwateran article by Scientific American. Midwestern Farmers have relied on the High Plains Aquifer System
since they first discovered the solution to their drought woes nearly six decades ago. The massive underground water source has turned a vast dry swath of the Great plains from North dakota to Texas into arable farmland.
But in recent years reliance on the aquifer has skyrocketed leading scientists to project that, barring a change in current irrigation trends,
nearly 70 percent of the resource could be depleted in the next half century. Scientists studying groundwater declines in western Kansas who published their results in the August 26 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that farmers had tapped close to 3 percent of the aquifer s supply by 1960 and 30
percent by 2010. At current usage rates, they estimate that an additional 39 percent of the water in the aquifer will disappear by 2060.
Once depleted, the aquifer could take anywhere from 500 to 1, 300 years to completely refill.
Even as improvements in irrigation technology over the next two decades enable farmers to do more with less,
Emergence of H7n9 avian flu hints at broader threatthe H7n9 influenza virus did not emerge alone.
Researchers have traced the evolution of the deadly avian flu currently spreading in China, and have found evidence that it developed in parallel with a similar bird flu, H7n7,
which can infect mammals1. Although there is no evidence that this H7n7 strain will infect humans,
the authors of a study published today in Nature1 say that their finding reinforces the idea that H7 avian viruses are constantly mixing
a co-author of the study and an influenza specialist at St jude Children s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.
says lead author Yi Guan, an influenza specialist at the University of Hong kong. In China, the virus has infected 135 people
This is a very different influenza ecosystem from other countries says Guan. Guan's team sampled wild birds and poultry markets around Shanghai in April,
About 10%of samples tested positive for an influenza virus; of those, 15%were an H7 virus
and compared them to other bird-flu strains, they found H7n9 and H7n7 to be hybrids of wild Eurasian waterfowl strains, such as H7n3 and H11n9.
The scientists think that those viruses swapped genes in domestic ducks before spreading to chickens, where they traded genes with a common chicken virus, H9n2.
David Morens, an influenza researcher and senior adviser at the US National institutes of health in Bethesda, Maryland, says that the evolutionary pathway that the viruses followed suggests that more surveillance
and better sanitation practices at poultry markets are crucial to monitoring risks to human health.
an epidemiologist at Columbia University in New york city, says that surveillance is not a foolproof solution.
a devastating disease caused by the fungus Venturia inaequalis. In 1999, they finally produced a tasty variety that contained the Vf defence gene,
it would take another 40  years to breed a resistant strain conventionally, says Henk  Schouten, a plant scientist at Wageningen University in The netherlands.
The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), the branch of the agriculture department responsible for overseeing GM CROPS,
is trying to use genes from grape varieties to engineer a wine grape that is resistant to Pierce s disease a condition caused by a bacterium that has made it difficult to grow wine grapes in the state.
because the extra machinery would reduce the fitness, says Norman Ellstrand, a plant geneticist at the University of California in Riverside.
Oryza sativa, gets a significant fitness boost from glyphosate resistance, even when glyphosate is applied not. In their study, published this month in New Phytologist1,
The authors have called on the US Food and Drug Administration to bar the practice. See go. nature. com/jqccur and page 253 for more.
Coronavirus clues Scientists have an early lead in the search for animal sources of the Middle east respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-Cov),
all showed evidence of previous infection with MERS-Cov or a closely related virus (C.  B.  E.  M.  Reusken et  al.
whether camels could be a source of human infections. Stormy Atlantic The current Atlantic hurricane season,
citing concerns over future marketing and potential health effects. The crop is engineered to contain à Â-carotene
and helps to mitigate vitamin  A deficiency which causes malnutrition and affects 1. 7 million children in the Philippines.
H7n9 virus persists China reported on 11 august its first new case of the H7n9 avian influenza virus in three weeks:
Misconduct finding A dermatology researcher at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, has been sanctioned for misconduct by the US Office of Research Integrity (ORI).
Pratima Karnik admitted submitting a grant application to the US National institutes of health that contained text plagiarized from a grant application she had reviewed,
or advising for US public-health services for two years. Brain-implant trial A deep-brain stimulation (DBS) device that not only delivers electrical pulses,
but also records brain activity simultaneously, has been implanted in a person for the first time. Until now there has been a lack of data on how the brain responds to DBS,
which is used to treat motor disorders such as Parkinson s disease, and is being tested for some psychiatric conditions.
On 7 Â August, the device maker Medtronic in Minneapolis, Minnesota announced the start of clinical trials for the system, with the first implantation in a person with Parkinson s in Germany.
Genetics lawsuit Ambry Genetics in Aliso Viejo, California, has countersued its competitor Myriad Genetics. Myriad, a medical diagnostics company in Salt lake city, Utah, sued Ambry in July for infringing patents that Myriad holds on tests for cancer-associated mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes.
Last week Ambry replied that Myriad s patent claims were invalid in light of a June ruling by the US Supreme court that human genes cannot be patented (see Nature 498,281-282;
or inadvertently transmit disease, or that hybridization between species could occur that would lower the planet's overall genetic diversity.
GM rice delivers antibodies against deadly rotavirusa strain of rice genetically engineered to protect against diarrhoeal disease could offer a cost-effective way to protect children in developing countries,
according a study published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation yesterday (8 august). Researchers engineered the rice, called Mucorice-ARP1,
by adding an antibody to fight rotavirus originally found in llamas in the rice genome.
Rotavirus is the leading cause of severe diarrhea in young children and infants, killing more than 520,000 people each year,
The rice could be used to complement vaccinations to protect children when they are at their most vulnerable to rotavirus,
since 2009 that rotavirus vaccines be included in national immunisation programmes. But studies have shown since that these vaccines are less effective in developing countries than in industrialised countries,
protecting only 50-60 per cent of people immunised in developing countries, compared with 85-98 per cent in industrialised countries.
Mucorice-ARP1 could complement existing vaccine schedules. It would not be a substitute for a vaccine,
she says, but it's something that in certain situations could be very helpful. For example, the rice could be given to children under two years old
when rotavirus infection is most likely to prove fatal. The research team found that Mucorice-ARP1 is most effective
although the antibodies could also be ingested either in cooked rice or by drinking the water in
Previous clinical trials in Bangladesh have established already that the antibody arp1 can protect against rotavirus.
Llamas produce single-chain antibodies which have two important properties: one, they are very small
and can reach areas of the pathogen which otherwise might not be reached by other antibodies
Normal human antibodies are chained dual. If you eat it and it goes through the stomach,
and the fact that it is produced widely as a staple food make it a good vehicle for delivering the antibody.
including rotavirus vaccines, oral rehydration solution and zinc supplementation, Santosham says. We must ensure that all the currently available tools are made available to every child in the world
The PAR hypothesis could offer one explanation for the high rate of metabolic diseases such as high blood pressure,
obesity and diabetes among people who experience food scarcity early in life. It proposes that
they are more apt to store abdominal fat and gain weight, leading to a plethora of metabolic disorders.
such as low food or high population density around the time that you re developing, is essentially bad for your fitness,
which was marked by high death rates from diseases such as smallpox, typhus and whooping cough. They investigated how crop yields around the time of birth affected people's survival and reproductive success during the famine.
Because the main cause of death during the Finnish famine was infectious disease, which the PAR hypothesis does not address,
would be whether poor early-life nutrition protected the Finnish populations against later starvation or malnutrition.
The duo shared the 1981 Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine with Roger Sperry. Smithsonian head Civil engineer Wayne Clough will retire next year as leader of the Smithsonian Institution in WASHINGTON DC
Tang tested the health benefits of Golden Rice genetically modified to produce a Vitamin a precursor on children in China s Hunan province (see Nature http://doi. org/nv9;
the Food and Drug Administration and the National institutes of health (NIH) announced on 19 september. More than $273 Â million may be invested over the next five years to help the programme to develop
The NIH last week also announced some $45 Â million in awards to study early interventions for Alzheimer s disease.
) Cancer cash On 21 september, philanthropists Phil and Penny Knight announced that they would donate US$500 million to cancer research at Oregon Health
The money would support science at the university s Knight Cancer Institute, to which the couple gave a $100-million donation in 2008.
The consortium of 12 research and health-care institutions was created three years ago as part of New york city s push to become a biomedical-research hub.
Worldwide, malnutrition accounts for about 45%of deaths of children under five years old. 27 september In Stockholm, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change releases a summary of its fifth assessment of the basic scientific evidence for climate change.
or they could set millions of nonsmokers on the path to nicotine addiction, revolutionizing the tobacco industry into the bargain.
So the question on the lips of health experts, policy-makers and consumers alike is, are the devices a health problem that needs tight regulation,
or a welcome aid to smokers trying to quit? In less than a decade since their first appearance, electronic or e-cigarettes have become a multibillion-dollar industry.
which can then be inhaled as smoke (see Smoke without fire and Comparison of toxins in conventional and electronic cigarettes).
In October, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is expected to issue a rule that affirms it has the authority to regulate e-cigarettes,
overriding a previous court decision that e-cigarettes could not be controlled as medical devices. The European union is also overhauling its regulation of tobacco with a massive piece of legislation that,
as currently drafted, will regulate most e-cigarettes as medical devices. A vote on this legislation is due in the European parliament on 8 october.
although studies by the FDA and Health New zealand, a research consultancy based in Christchurch, have shown that some brands contain carcinogens
and other toxic chemicals, including diethylene glycol and N-nitrosamines (A d. Flouris and D. N. Oikonomou Br.
But although the devices are smoke-free, nicotine itself causes high blood pressure and palpitations, and is highly addictive.
says Peter Hajek, director of the Tobacco Dependence Research Unit at Barts and the London School of medicine and Dentistry."
"That s the biggest hope we have of ending the tobacco epidemic. But as big tobacco companies have piled into a market worth more than US$2 billion worldwide,
only if they are marketed as quitting aids. The United kingdom has said it will regulate them as medicines meaning they will have to meet strict quality standards but its regulator
the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory agency, is holding fire until the new European rules are in place.
The decisions that regulators make will shape not just the future of the industry but also the public-health response and scientists both for and against e-cigarettes have waded into the debate
while regulation is still up in the air.""Right now, electronic cigarettes are the triumph of wishful thinking over data,
He points to a report released earlier this month by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia,
and e-cigarettes, indicating that the products are being used to sustain nicotine addiction. The use of vapour flavourings
Other scientists, such as Hajek, say that regulating e-cigarettes as medical devices would be a disaster.
He believes that the cost of complying with rules for medical devices would allow big tobacco companies to dominate the nascent e-cigarette industry,
agrees Christopher Bullen of the National Institute for Health Innovation at the University of Auckland in New zealand.
) Vaughan Rees, a tobacco researcher at Harvard School of Public health in Boston, Massachusetts, thinks that e-cigarettes need to improve before they can replace cigarettes and that, for now,
Although they do present an opportunity to improve public health, he adds, care needs to be taken to ensure that they don t flourish alongside conventional cigarettes."
Pig-manure fertilizer linked to human MRSA infections  People living near pig farms or agricultural fields fertilized with pig manure are more likely to become infected with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria,
according to a paper published today in JAMA Internal Medicine1. Previous research has found that livestock workers are at high risk of carrying MRSA,
whether the spreading of MRSA through livestock puts the public at risk of infection. The study examined the incidence of infections in Pennsylvania,
where manure from pig farms is often spread on crop fields to comply with state regulations for manure disposal.
Researchers reviewed electronic health-care records from patients who sought care from the Pennsylvania-based Geisinger Health System
which affected 1, 539 patients, and health-care-associated MRSA (HA-MRSA), which affected 1, 335 patients.
The two categories refer to where patients acquire the infection as well as the bacteria s genetic lineages,
but the distinction has grown fuzzier as more patients bring MRSA in and out of the hospital.)
Then the researchers examined whether infected people lived near pig farms or agricultural land where pig manure was spread.
and sputum samples isolated from patients in the same health-care system in 2012. The MRSA strains found in those samples are commonly found in humans.
Researchers did not find any evidence of bacteria belonging to clonal complex 398 (CC398 a MRSA strain classically associated with livestock
and found in farms and farmworkers in many previous studies. However, there is little information about
Many researchers think that widespread use of antibiotics to encourage growth in farm animals fuels the proliferation of MRSA and other drug-resistant bacteria.
The latest findings suggest that manure is helping antibiotic resistance to spread, says Joan Casey, an environmental-health scientist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public health in Baltimore, Maryland,
and a co-author of the study.""We ve certainly described a connection we think is plausible,
a paediatrician and the principal investigator of the MRSA Research center at the University of Chicago in Illinois. He adds that he would like to see similar studies done in different geographic regions,
whether the MRSA strains carried in pig manure are the same as the MRSA strains found in nearby human infections.
Food-borne illnesses are not always home-grownscottish cows have a bum rap. For decades, the local cattle have been prime suspects behind the country s outbreaks of drug-resistant,
food-borne illnesses. But research now suggests that humans and imported foods are the real culprits.
A team of researchers compared the genome sequences of nearly 400 samples of diarrhoea-causing Salmonella enterica collected from people and livestock in Scotland.
They found that bacterial strains infecting humans were largely distinct from those found in local cattle,
but had close ties to strains that had been isolated in other countries. The results suggest that mass epidemics may spark from a complicated intermingling of bacteria between animals and humans and from exchanges between different countries
the authors say. Their findings are published today in Science1.""There is a pervading wisdom that local animals are a predominant source of pathogens
and resistance, says study co-author Stuart Reid, a veterinary epidemiologist at the Royal Veterinary College in Hatfield, UK.
But as his team's findings show, that may not always be the case.""It s only if we can treat this as an international issue that we re going to get to the bottom of it,
he says. Reid and his colleagues focused on Scottish outbreaks because of the country s ample collection of bacterial samples obtained from both humans and livestock.
when global epidemics of drug-resistant salmonella infections began to arise. Livestock was assumed to be the source of the epidemics
because animals naturally harbour the bacteria. To find out whether this was really the case, the team used whole-genome sequencing to trace the tiny evolutionary steps of the collected bacterial strains.
They analysed 142 samples isolated from Scottish patients and 120 from local animals mostly cows, then compared them with 111 strains collected from people and animals in other countries.
The team found that strains infecting Scottish patients were different from those in local livestock.
And they noted only a few instances in which strains isolated from local livestock had spread to humans.
But they also found that strains could spread from humans to animals.""It s occurring at a low frequency,
but in both directions, explains lead author Alison Mather, an epidemiologist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute near Cambridge, UK.
When they looked at the strains'antimicrobial resistance, the researchers found that bacteria from humans had more diverse collections of resistance genes than those in local livestock.
This indicates that local livestock cannot be the sole source of the resistance genes found in the strains found in humans.
The authors therefore suggest that local livestock are not the source of drug-resistant human salmonella outbreaks in Scotland.
Rather, they say foreign strains carried by other humans and in imported food probably entered the country and infected animals and humans separately,
then continued to evolve and acquire resistance separately. The authors stress that the study does not imply that antimicrobial resistance developed on farms is less concerning than previously thought,
including resistance stemming from the controversial practice of giving antibiotics in feed to promote animal growth.
We're not saying it's not as bad, we're just saying that there are other sources that need to be considered,
says Reid. Though local animals were not a main source of these pathogens he explains that it does not eliminate the possibility that resistance genes from local farms
and foreign farms played a role. Mark Woolhouse, an epidemiologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, says that the study clarifies how pathogens and drug-resistance genes spread."
"It s not just multi-bug, multi-drug, he says, "but multi-country. Scotland imports most of its red meat,
but the authors say that the country does not have adequate surveillance in place to determine
whether imported food is a source of new pathogens. Both Woolhouse and the authors call for Scotland
Lance Price, a genomic epidemiologist at the George washington University in WASHINGTON DC, says that it is not surprising that Scottish cattle are not the source of Scottish outbreaks,
because the epidemics were international. He notes however, that, to eliminate the possibility of a domestically derived outbreak,
"Meat sale and meat trade across borders is making it harder to control antibiotic-resistant pathogens at a local scale
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