Forest fires are associated generally with deforestation, but drought amplifies the impact of fires that are set in order to clear land.
A recent analysis in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences4 builds on this by suggesting that drought conditions could spur leaf loss and new leaf budding while simultaneously leading to a rise in tree deaths.
Fedoroff is getting back to her roots in plant genetics by heading up a new centre for desert agriculture in Saudi arabia.
Longo and her colleagues identified the grains based on their shape as belonging to the root of a species of cattail and the grains of a grass called Brachypodium.
The researchers also found grinding tools coated with cattail and fern residues at human sites in southern Moravia in the Czech republic and south of Moscow
Unlike Neolithic humans, who domesticated and cultivated grains such as wheat and barley, these hunter-gatherers relied on wild vegetation.
For example, once ground and cooked, the cattail grains contain nearly as much energy as domesticated cereals,
Two languages with many differences would be placed on distant branches, just as two species with the most genetic divergence would sit at opposite ends of a phylogenetic tree.
Working back through the branches, they estimated how societies had changed and evolved over time, using language as a proxy measure.
Nature Newsgenetically modified (GM CROPS can save farmers using conventional seeds even more money than those using the transgenic varieties,
but don't have to pay the higher prices for the GM seeds. Overall, Hutchison's team found that corn-borer populations have declined by between 27%and 73%across the five states in the 14 years
the corn earworm (Helicoverpa zea), has evolved resistance to Bt toxin in situations where GM-crop coverage is 100%.
The results are positive news for GM seed producers. But 5 of the 18 authors listed on the Science paper work for big food
or agribusiness companies, including Syngenta Seeds in Slater, Iowa and General mills in Le Sueur, Minnesota.
Many will focus on local staples such as cowpea (or black-eyed pea), cassava and sweet potato. Uganda's biosafety law has been stuck in the country's legislative system for years.
These'phytolith'layers mark locations where vegetation grew or was stored. Weiner and his team have calculated that the layer
But the meadows and steppes of the Tibetan Plateau are bucking that trend plants are starting to bloom later in spring,
and autumn events, such as changes in leaf colour, about 3 days earlier2. But then my Phd student Haiying Yu looked at more recent data
The group used satellite data to identify the start, end and length of the growing season for the meadow and steppe vegetation of the Tibetan Plateau between 1982 and 2006,
During this time, the mean temperature rose about 1. 4 Â C on the steppes and 1. 25 Â C on the lower-lying meadows.
The net effect was a shortening of the growing season by about one month for steppe plants and three weeks for meadow vegetation.
and modelled the timing of leaf-bud burst in 22 North american tree species throughout the twenty-first century3.
For instance, flowers may bloom one or two months early, says Spevak, which may mean queen bumblebees find less nectar
Sterile moths wipe out cotton pest: Nature Newsbetween May and October for four consecutive years, aeroplanes crisscrossed the morning skies above Arizona's cotton fields, dropping millions of tiny moths onto the croplands below.
The little grey insects are among the world's most notorious agricultural pests: their larvae are the pink bollworms (Pectinophora gossypiella), also known as'pinkies'.
'However, the moths released from the planes were different from those responsible for the caterpillars munching their way through the state's cotton crops.
and genetically modified cotton crops, engineered to produce a toxin deadly to pinkies, would put an end to farmers'costly struggle against the caterpillars.
genetically modified cotton crops had driven already down the population one million-fold, says Tabashnik. The crops produce a toxin that is made naturally by the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis
To his surprise, the models suggested that the combination of Bt cotton and sterile-moth releases could wipe out pest populations
about 2 billion pink bollworm moths were released into Arizona's cotton fields. By 2009, a survey of 16,600 cotton bolls from conventional crops yielded only two pink bollworm larvae,
and farmers had stopped using insecticide sprays to keep the pinkie population in check. So far, no live pink bollworm caterpillars have been found in bolls of cotton this season,
says Tabashnik. The results are tremendous says entomologist William Hutchison at the University of Minnesota in St paul,
it's conceivable that farmers will someday no longer have a use for Bt cotton at all.
she said in a recent interview posted on the Collide-a-Scape climate blog. Curry began to find other examples where she thought the IPCC was torquing the science in various ways.
who runs the militantly evenhanded Collide-a-Scape blog. What scientists worry is that such exposure means Curry has the power to do damage to a consensus on climate change that has been building for the past 20 years.
Fragaria vesca the fleshy shoot tips of which are technically neither fruit nor berry has a relatively small genome.
potentially making it a good candidate for further study in the lab. This could open the way to studies on flavour and disease resistance in the cultivated strawberry Fragaria x ananassa,
and even in other relatives of the plant such as apples and peaches, all members of the Rosaceae family.
vegetation and peat land have burned across the Russian Federation since the fires began in June.
In Michigan, Heather Ames, the student whose work was targeted, is still hoping to finish her Phd by spring.
Cellulosic ethanol producers are trying to generate fuel from biomass such as leaves and branches. These feedstocks have the advantage that they are plentiful
Samples of wild plants will now be conserved alongside existing stores of domesticated seeds (such as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen.
On 8 december, its reusable'Dragon'capsule was launched on a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape canaveral, Florida.
Evolution of potato blight pathogen traced: Nature Newsresearchers have traced the key genetic changes that enabled the plant pathogen responsible for the 1845 Irish potato famine (Phytophthora infestans) to jump from wild plant hosts to cultivated potatoes.
These genetic clues could aid the development of fungicides and disease-resistant varieties of potato that the pathogen will find much more difficult to adapt to and overcome.
or funguslike microorganism, that destroys both the tuber and its leaves continues to be a major problem for farmers.
The researchers identified the key genes by comparing the genetic make-up of the potato blight pathogen and several of its sister species. To do so,
they sequenced the genomes of four of the potato blight's sister species, including Phytophthera phaseoli,
including that for spore generation, but that they also had made numerous regions up of non-coding repeated DNA sequences.
The genetically conserved part of the genome could be the potato blight pathogen's Achilles heel, adds Kamoun.
which describes the genetic make-up of an unrelated powdery mildew (Blumeria graminis) that affects barley. Pietro Spanu
Commenting on the potato blight paper, he says: They, like us, suggest that these regions are highly plastic
Klein stays on The head of a US$3-billion stem-cell agency has reversed his decision to quit,
Coming up 11-15 december The chemical and physical signals that influence pluripotency in stem cells are among many topics discussed at the American Society for Cell biology's 50th annual meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
or a moth's almost perfect mimicry of tree bark. In some snails, however, it's simply down to a poor fit with a snake's jaw.
is scheduled to make its first attempt to launch a spacecraft into orbit on its Falcon 9 rocket and return the craft to Earth.
Slime moulds prosper on the microfarm: Nature Newsa slime mould long thought to hunt bacteria as prey turns out to have unexpected abilities:
according to researchers in Texas, some of the amoebae are actually farmers, husbanding their bacterial'crops'much as some ant species farm fungus.
As social amoebae, slime moulds are bizarre creatures that live as individual singled-celled organisms while feeding,
but congregate in groups of tens of thousands to form multicellular'slugs'that migrate to new areas
such as fungus-farming ants although compared to the ants, which actively feed, nurture and defend their crops,
It was thought previously that slime moulds were strictly predators of bacteria, forming the multicellular slug when scant food supplies prompted a move to new hunting grounds.
and noticed that some of these seemed to have bacteria in their reproductive structures, alongside their spores.
just as humans plant seeds in areas with naturally growing vegetation. But farming has its costs.
Farmers don't eat their seed. They wait for the crop to grow.
Seven days: 14 20 january 2011: Nature Newspolicy Research People Business Trend watch Coming up Number crunch Policy Haiti's cholera fight Health officials have outlined plans for a proposed cholera vaccination
The seeds will compete with another maize strain unveiled last July by Swiss agribusiness Syngenta.
Both companies used conventional breeding rather than genetic engineering to produce their seeds. Pioneer says that field studies show its new hybrids will increase maize yields by 5%in water-limited environments
as well as seed firm Monsanto, based in St louis, Missouri, are also working on transgenic maize varieties, hoping to tap into a multibillion-dollar market (see Nature 466,548-551;
%The big seed companies are also contributing expertise. Last year, South africa was home to the first field trial for a transgenic drought-tolerant maize crop,
Nature Newsan international effort to protect coastal wetlands by assigning them carbon credits kicked off last week in Paris. The aim is to do for some wetland plants mangroves, seagrasses and salt marshes
and in its watery depths are acres of seagrass meadows that use about 15%of the dissolved carbon to grow.
Mangroves and salt-marsh vegetation similarly accumulate carbon and when they decompose their carbon is locked away in watery, peaty sediments for millennia.
because no one knows exactly how many seagrass beds and salt marshes exist. Some regions, such as North america, are audited well;
when it comes to seagrasses. Earth-observing satellites lack the ability to look into turbid waters
sea lettuce that stores little carbon and algae attached to rocks. Data from Landsat satellites revealed the true extent of mangroves only last year.
This flat-footed structure grants chimpanzees tremendous flexibility and allows them to grasp branches in trees.
Stem-cell tangle The legal uncertainty over the status of research using human embryonic stem (ES) cells in the United states is harming work on stem cells in general,
according to a survey of 370 researchers released on 3 february (A d. Levine Cell Stem Cell 8,
(Rangifer tarandus caribou) without diminishing lumber and pulp production. The companies that hold the rights to log roughly one-quarter of Canada's boreal forest have agreed to discuss giving them up in some unspecified areas;
if carbon from cleared vegetation were released back into the atmosphere. But that study underestimated the amount of carbon-12 taken up by peatlands
Nature Newsmassive Amazonian characid fish may carry seeds more than five kilometres across forest flood plains,
Although fish have long been suspected of having an important role in seed distribution, proof of their ability to carry fertile seeds such distances has been lacking.
Jill Anderson, an evolutionary ecologist at Duke university in North carolina, and her team had discovered previously thousands of seeds in the guts of Colossoma macropomum fish in Peru's Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve1.
However, it was not clear how far the creatures might carry these seeds, nor whether they deposited them in areas where such seeds might grow.
To answer these questions Anderson, then at Cornell University in Ithaca, New york, and her colleagues radio-tracked 24 of the animals during three flood seasons at the reserve
and found that the location of wild fish varied by as much as 5. 9 km.
Combining this with data from captive fish on how long seeds are retained in their guts, the authors predict that C. macropomum probably have a mean dispersal distance of 337-552 metres
Crucially, the team's modelling work also suggests that the bulk of the seeds are distributed on the flood plains where they are likely to germinate rather than in permanent bodies of water such as lakes.
In the African tropics, for example, it is likely that fish distribute grass seeds, and fish in North america and Europe probably also move seeds around.
However, both of these are understudied woefully, Horn notes, in part because it is much easier to study seed distribution by birds and terrestrial mammals.
Horn's own research has shown an involvement for fish in distributing fig tree seeds in Costa Rica3.
The whole field is fertile for further study says Horn. Even having established C. macropomum as among the top players in the distribution league,
The study predicts that larger fish will distribute seeds further. However, most of the team's radio-tracked fish did not come close to the maximum reported size for C. macropomum,
Fish help to spread forest seeds. In some areas populations have declined by 90, %says Anderson.
Overfishing could really alter the seed distribution of these habitats.
Australian grazing trial ignites debate: Nature Newsto ecologists overseas, the invitation might sound tempting. It offers travel to Australia
by eating the vegetation that forms potential fuel, and that ecologists have ignored mountain cattlemen's knowledge of the land.
But many populations are affected also by an invasive geranium from the Mediterranean which is out-competing the butterfly's host plant.
as nitrogen fertilization helps the exotic geranium take over. It just doesn't make any sense to ask what percentage of the decline is due to anthropogenic climate change from a scientific standpoint it doesn't have much value.
instead is manage for invasive geranium, lower the nitrogen pollution and set up new reserves that anticipate climate change that is,
Almost two-thirds of species, including many birds, frogs, butterflies, trees and grassland flowers, breed or bloom earlier.
or wild flower species is becoming extinct or expanding northwards? Yes. Phenology signals are clearer than changes in species distribution.
when it comes to conservation, according to a study by Philip Hulme, a weed specialist at Lincoln University in New Zealand1.
or fungus that might pose a threat. And its shop doesn't sell anything that is considered invasive.
such as the African tulip Tree (Spathodea campanulata) are planted commonly in a bit of laziness because everybody likes them.
The treaty is known best for its role in paving the way for construction of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway.
And he calls for more research on orphan crops, such as quinoa (Chenopodium), a grain-like crop originating in South america.
The party is opposed to research using human embryonic stem cells, which has benefited never from clear regulation in Ireland.
Booking a rocket The first contracts have been signed to send researchers into suborbit using commercial spacecraft.
Wheat killer A research programme tackling a devastating wheat fungus has been granted US$40 million over five years as part of a partnership between the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington,
The Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat project, involving more than a dozen institutes and coordinated by Cornell University in Ithaca, New york,
aims to create plants that can withstand strains of the evolving stem-rust pathogen Ug99.
opting for biotech cotton. Sweden also made its first foray into commercial GM CROPS, planting the'Amflora'high-starch potato.
Canada, exploring links between stem cells and cancer. go. nature. com/5lwqim 7 11 march Preliminary analysis of dust picked up from a distant asteroid last year by the Hayabusa spacecraft will be among highlights of the 42nd Lunar and Planetary Science
Funding Golden rice funds The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is giving US$18. 6 million to research on transgenic, nutritionally fortified rice and cassava.
The centre hopes the enhanced cassava will gain approval in Kenya and Nigeria by 2017.
Nature Newsnearly US$20 million in new grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will be spent on getting nutritionally enhanced rice and cassava to market and decreasing malnourishment in Asia and Africa.
and Biocassava Plus, a tuber fortified with Vitamin a, iron and protein in Kenya and Nigeria.
and around 70 million Africans rely on cassava. It's no surprise then, that vitamin and mineral deficiencies affect more than two billion people worldwide,
and contribute to around 7%of deaths and 10%of the disease burden in low-income countries, according to Juan Pablo Pena-Rosas, coordinator of the Micronutrients Unit at the World health organization in Geneva, Switzerland.
and increase its nutritional yield, explains Pena-Rosas. The firm Harvestplus in WASHINGTON DC, which released orange sweet potato containing 50%of the daily Vitamin a requirement in Uganda and Mozambique in 2007,
The team found that flatfish, molluscs, crustaceans and brown seaweed offshore of Fukushima received radiation doses that,
including viruses, bacteria and fungi some novel that, alone or in combination, might push a bee colony into precipitous decline.
At the meeting, Cornman presented data showing that hives affected by CCD have higher levels of microscopic gut fungi called Nosema,
Clinic shut down One of the world's most notorious stem-cell therapy centres had to cease operations last week
and Cologne, injected stem cells from bone marrow into the brain, spinal cord and other body parts of patients.
Business Stem-cell trials California's state stem-cell agency can for the first time say that it is funding a clinical trial.
California, which in 2009 was the first company to get US approval to undertake a clinical trial involving human embryonic stem cells.
translation of stem cells from research tools to therapies was a major selling point. 3d transistors Computer-chip manufacturer Intel has announced that it will mass-produce three-dimensional transistors for its next generation of chips.
an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago in Illinois. Stem-cell pioneer Shinya Yamanaka at the University of Kyoto in Japan was among 18 new foreign associate members.
but citations of at least six of the future Nobel laureate's older papers also rose (see chart).
Other people had looked at melanins in fungus near Chernobyl. Eumelanin helps defend fungus, says Ismael Galv ¡
n a biologist at the University of Paris-Sud and a contributor to the new study along with Mousseau and M ¸ller.
Locusts lay their eggs in moist, sandy soils and flourish when the desert blooms. If the breeding gets out of control,
and satellite imagery for tracking rainfall and vegetation as well as hand-held global-positioning-system devices to monitor progress in the field.
Orbiting sensors can identify pockets of vegetation hidden at the base of sand dunes and along ephemeral streams, says Pietro Ceccato, a remote-sensing scientist at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society who works with the FAO's locust team at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty
who developed the current method for detecting vegetation using NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer sensor
We want to know how small is the smallest patch of vegetation that we can detect, he says.
who studies the development of plant roots from stem cells, and Xuemei Chen (pictured) at the University of California, Riverside,
who looks at the formation of flowers. See go. nature. com/r4yblx for more. Events Primate peril Employees at a major US primate-research centre
Heather Allison, a microbiologist at the University of Liverpool, UK, and David Acheson, a managing director for food safety at consulting firm Leavitt Partners in WASHINGTON DC, agree it is plausible that exposure to antibiotics in agricultural use
and affect boys and girls equally. Initial theories suggested that young adult women are the people most likely to purchase,
and even shotguns to gather samples of vegetation from forest canopies around the globe. They have created a digital catalogue of the chemical and optical properties of some 4, 700 plant species in different conditions.
and has indicated also that it will not broaden its definition of noxious weeds, a class of plants that falls under its regulatory purview,
and several non-governmental organizations have followed suit with a campaign of sunflower planting. Nakanishi says that the effort is nonsense,
and commercial release is Bt cotton which has added genes from the Bacillus thuringiensis bacterium, making the plant produce toxins that confer resistance to some insect pests.
A Bt cotton variety is being developed for Kenyan farmers at KARI. According to the regulations it will take a minimum of three months to get the green light for environmental release after permission is sought from the authorities.
Kenya, believes the patenting of seeds is unethical and undermines farmers'rights to save seeds.
Our public research institutions must shift their focus back to farmers'needs rather than support the agenda of agribusiness
The not-so-humble potato (Solanum tuberosum) is the world's fourth most important food crop
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.
thanks to its complex genetics, the tuber has been notoriously difficult to improve through breeding. The possibilities for improvement through marker-assisted breeding and genetic modification could make the potato a more viable alternative to grain crops,
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,
and June 2011 rose by 15%compared with the same period the season before. If that number holds up in the final analysis using higher resolution satellite data
and vegetation cover for example, but those data can reflect temporary heat waves and dry spells rather than long-term desertification.
and the area of land covered by vegetation. This will begin to provide a baseline from which to measure
a quick-growing weed with a small genome that serves as a reference for plants that are harder to study.
) Many Arabidopsis researchers are now hoping to apply what they have learned from the weed to agriculturally important species with genomes once considered too big to tackle.
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,
say the authors of study in Evolution and Development1. The researchers, led by paleontologist Feng Tang of the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences in Beijing,
believe that Eoandromeda is the ancient ancestor of modern ocean dwellers known as comb jellies gelatinous creatures similar to jellyfish,
The proposal is in tune with DNA studies that place comb jellies closer to the root of the evolutionary tree.
Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing in the Smithsonian National Zoological Park in WASHINGTON DC, found that 92%of the cellulose
incorporating herbal flavourings or preservatives. Mark Lawall, a specialist in ancient Mediterranean trade at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg,
as well as fruit, fish, meat and resin. He says the DNA approach offers great promise for advances in terms of analysing amphora contents from archaeologically documented wrecks,
soya and cotton with little public resistance, but EMBRAPA is now tinkering with a product that people eat in large quantities every day,
including cassava. EMBRAPA is already looking to develop other virus-resistant beans, including common black beans and the popular carioca bean.
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.
200 volunteers (all HSBC employees) to measure tree growth, study the decomposition of leaf litter on the forest floor
From air to orbit Rockets bound for orbit could one day be fired not from launch pads,
) 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
Stem-cell appeal A lawsuit seeking to halt US federal funding for research on human embryonic stem cells is not quite dead
Both work on adult stem cells. F. Roberts/Alamyfracking worry The US Environmental protection agency (EPA) has said that chemicals associated with fracking,
Biofuel from beneath the wavesbioengineers have devised a way to produce ethanol from seaweed, laying the groundwork for a biofuel that doesn't sacrifice food crops.
so that it could digest brown seaweed and produce ethanol. Their work is published in Science today1.
Yoshikuni says that his group chose brown seaweed because it was both sustainable and scalable."
"Seaweed is produced already in huge quantities around the world without taking up any fresh water or arable land.
Brown seaweed also grows faster than red or green seaweed, with varieties such as the giant kelp, found off the coast of California, growing by up to a metre a day.
Many researchers are exploring ways to produce ethanol without using food crops such as sugar cane or maize (corn),
and have turned to different feedstocks including switchgrass, the succulent plant jatropha, cyanobacteria and green algae. However, producing biofuels from sugar cane
or maize not only detracts from food supplies, but also takes up huge areas of arable land.
But producing biofuels from seaweed has so far proved difficult for bioengineers. Seaweed produces four kinds of sugars laminarin, mannitol, alginate and cellulose.
The biggest fraction in brown seaweed is alginate, which is a complex polysaccharide and tricky for microbes to digest."
or sugar cane, says Yoshikuni.""Alginate is the key to unlocking the potential of brown seaweed.
So using Vibrio splendidus, a marine microbe that can digest brown seaweed, Yoshikuni and his team isolated a biochemical pathway that breaks down alginate.
They inserted the genes responsible into a strain of E coli, which could then digest the alginate into simple sugars.
enabling the direct production of ethanol from brown seaweed. This strain of E coli could, in theory, be engineered to produce a variety of other useful chemicals and fuels."
who also studies biofuel production from seaweed. Jin works with red seaweed, which is less abundant in the world s oceans than brown seaweed,
but"relatively easy to ferment using yeast, he says, because of its lower alginate content2. Stephen Mayfield, director of the San diego Center for Algae Biotechnology at the University of California San diego, calls the work"a very sophisticated engineering feat,
but adds"so far this has almost nothing to do with bioenergy production. The main challenge in biofuels is not the ability to degrade complex carbohydrates and turn them into simple sugars,
he explains:""It s the rest of the steps involved in the lifecycle of growing
people have farmed seaweed for hundreds of years, but only produce several thousand tonnes a year for food.
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