and maize market by the world's number-two seed company Dupont, which owns plant-genetics firm Pioneer hi-bred International,
harvesting old-growth trees and replacing them with seeds obtained from warmer climes can produce trees that will better withstand temperature increases,
Two new forms of a devastating wheat fungus known as Ug99 stem rust have arisen in South africa.
Nature Newsa decision by the European Court of Justice on a DNA patent held by global seed company Monsanto has caused a stir in the biotechnology industry,
Consulting with village elders, she helped identify the proper plant roots for natural dyes, which improved the weavers'business.
cotton and rice 墉 and stored planting seeds, including the major staple food crop wheat.
Most of the radioactive particles are in the soil rather than in the flammable leaf litter and trees,
who led the research team that found the canola (Brassica napus, also known as rapeseed). Sagers and her team found two varieties of transgenic canola in the wild one modified to be resistant to Monsanto's Roundup herbicide (glyphosate),
Sagers agrees that feral populations could have become established after trucks carrying cultivated GM seeds spilled some of their load during transportation.
Zhang and his colleagues are trying to crank that up by manipulating the chemistry and biology of the rhizosphere, the narrow layer of soil surrounding roots.
%Excess phosphorus in many of China's lakes, coastal waters and rivers has caused repeated occurrences of harmful algal blooms known as eutrophication.
The blooms consume much of the oxygen dissolved in the water, killing fish and other plant life,
or seed-bearing plants including conifers and cycads, are the most at-risk group of plants,
mainly plant tissues such as lignin, were buried both on land and at sea. Without the burial of organic matter, any excess oxygen created by photosynthesis is used up as it degrades.
who presented the RNA transcriptomes (the whole set of RNA molecules present) of 700-850-year-old maize (corn) seeds at a conference there last week.
whose team has sequenced small regulatory RNAS from ancient Egyptian barley seeds. Increasingly, biologists are discovering that the differences between organisms are due not to mutations that change the sequence of protein-coding genes
Oliver Smith and their colleagues examined small regulatory RNA molecules in 500-year-old barley seeds from Egypt.
along with the seeds showed that the seeds produced plants whose grains grow in rows of two, instead of the usual rows of six an adaptation to dry conditions.
is that the seeds also contain a gene mutation that normally produces six-row barley. He hopes that small RNAS
What's more, plant seeds are the ideal tissue in which to study ancient RNA
you are getting a very different picture than you will be getting with seeds, he says.
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.
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 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.
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
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
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.
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.
or funguslike microorganism, that destroys both the tuber and its leaves continues to be a major problem for farmers.
including that for spore generation, but that they also had made numerous regions up of non-coding repeated DNA sequences.
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.
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,
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;
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
Almost two-thirds of species, including many birds, frogs, butterflies, trees and grassland flowers, breed or bloom earlier.
The treaty is known best for its role in paving the way for construction of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway.
The party is opposed to research using human embryonic stem cells, which has benefited never from clear regulation in Ireland.
aims to create plants that can withstand strains of the evolving stem-rust pathogen Ug99.
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
and Biocassava Plus, a tuber fortified with Vitamin a, iron and protein in Kenya and Nigeria.
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.
Locusts lay their eggs in moist, sandy soils and flourish when the desert blooms. If the breeding gets out of control,
who studies the development of plant roots from stem cells, and Xuemei Chen (pictured) at the University of California, Riverside,
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
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,
suggests that the earliest branches in the tree need to be reordered, say the authors of study in Evolution and Development1.
The proposal is in tune with DNA studies that place comb jellies closer to the root of the evolutionary tree.
200 volunteers (all HSBC employees) to measure tree growth, study the decomposition of leaf litter on the forest floor
) 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,
Many researchers are exploring ways to produce ethanol without using food crops such as sugar cane or maize (corn),
However, producing biofuels from sugar cane or maize not only detracts from food supplies, but also takes up huge areas of arable land.
or sugar cane, says Yoshikuni.""Alginate is the key to unlocking the potential of brown seaweed.
6 12 january 2012stem-cell regulation China has ordered a halt to unapproved stem-cell treatments, and says that it will stop accepting new applications for clinical trials using stem-cell products until July.
The 10 january announcement by the government's health ministry was viewed as an effort to crack down on a flourishing trade in unproven stem-cell therapies,
which are offered widely and loosely regulated in the country. Telescope rivals The US National Science Foundation (NSF) has launched a competition for a giant ground-based telescope
soya bean and rapeseed causes a similar level of pollution to oil obtained from oil sands
Pfefferkorn and his colleagues have unearthed one such time capsule from 298-million-year-old rocks in northern China a'forest Pompeii'where the weight of falling ash ripped leaves from twigs,
the peat forest contained trees that looked like feather dusters, with trunks twice the height of telephone poles;
vines and three species of an enigmatic group called Noeggerathiales small spore-bearing trees that scientists think are close relatives of the earliest ferns."
sugar cane and beef. These standards focus on everything from soil management to workers'rights, and include limits on deforestation.
which released an analysis on 28 march that identifies countries in which investing in projects for production of sugar cane,
'With more than US$4 million in seed money from Norway, the consortium plans to announce an initial round of projects in the run-up to the UN Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de janeiro (Rio+20) in Brazil in June.
which have yields only 3%lower than in conventional farming and oilseed crops such as soybean,
algal blooms and damage to important wetlands, eucalyptus forests and wildlife. To address these problems,
The plan would mean fewer blooms of blue-green algae and less risk of acidification of the Lower Lakes.
Other medicines contained DNA from plants in the same family as ginseng the root of which is illegal to trade internationally as well as soya and nut-bearing plants,
says Allen Van Deynze, a molecular geneticist at the Seed Biotechnology Center at the University of California,
the plant known as pigweed or palmer amaranth (Amaranthus palmeri) isn t much to look at. But to farmers in the southeastern United states, it is a formidable foe.
has shown that planting a cover crop of rye blocks sunlight and reduces the number of pigweed seeds that germinate by 75%.
At the weed summit, agronomist Michael Walsh of the University of Western australia in Crawley described the Harrington Seed Destructor,
a harvester that collects weed seeds along with the crop, smashes up about 95%of them,
Most fuel ethanol is made by fermenting the sugars in grains or sugar cane, but cellulosic ethanol can be made from municipal waste, wood chips, grass,
and the stalks, leaves and stems of food crops. It is seen as a more sustainable biofuel
Monsanto argues that most Brazilian farmers still use smuggled seeds, and that the company is consequently being deprived of revenue
But the Brazilian Association of Seeds and Seedlings, a trade body, says that 70%of soya-bean farmers now buy their Roundup Ready seeds legally.
when we buy the seeds and then when we sell the soy
Risk assessment of US agro-biosafety lab found wantingan independent panel reviewing the dangers associated with establishing a high-security laboratory for studying animal diseases in the heart of US cattle country has found that the government
contributing to a sizeable overall drop in predicted US oilseed production for 2012-13.""Persistent and extreme June dryness across the central and Eastern corn belt and extreme late June and early July heat from the central Plains to the Ohio river Valley have lowered substantially yield prospects across most of the major growing regions,
The seed company Pioneer hi-bred in Johnston, Iowa, last year commercialized a conventionally bred drought-tolerant hybrid variety,
or master, teachers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Using $1 Â billion dedicated for the purpose in Obama s 2013 budget request,
and develop effective STEM teachers. Clinical trials The European commission has adopted proposals for new rules to replace its directive on clinical trials,
they could eventually be used to generate stem cells and sex cells, or in reproductive cloning. But the cells had to be frozen within days of George s death.
29 june 5 july 2012cell bank to close The Massachusetts Human Stem Cell Bank, at the University of Massachusetts Medical school in Shrewsbury, will close
to allow work on newly derived human embryonic stem-cell lines while restrictions were in place on federal funding.
with the difference due to factors such as the time it takes for roots to decay, and the fact that forest debris cut in one year might be burned in another (see Carbon lag).
Seed companies can counter this by engineering new crops that are resistant to additional herbicides such as a new soya bean developed by Dow Agrosciences of Indianapolis,
During the past five centuries, ranches, sugarcane plantations, logging and hunting have destroyed nearly 90%of the forest,
Rapeseed biodiesel fails sustainability testbiodiesels made using rapeseed oil may not be sustainable enough to be used in the European union (EU),
Germany, calculated the greenhouse-gas savings of rapeseed biofuel in several different situations. They looked at factors such as variations in soil quality and fertilizer application during crop production,
the team found greenhouse-gas savings of 29.7%for rapeseed, well below the commission's 38%estimate.
when the team used best-case greenhouse-gas-saving values for rapeseed production, did they find that the biofuel produces low enough emissions to be regarded as a sustainable biofuel under RED,
"Saying that rapeseed is sustainable in every case, as the EU does now, is simply not correct,
rapeseed biofuel would be even less sustainable, the authors say. Fausto Freire, who conducts research on biofuels at the University of Coimbra in Portugal
and Vietze s conclusion that the actual greenhouse-gas savings of rapeseed biofuel are much lower than those estimated by the commission.
and remove tree stumps from recently deforested land. It is unclear what effect, if any, the relaxed rules have had on the overall performance of the programme with respect to the uptake of loans.
Stem-cell funds The European parliament s legal committee has recommended that research involving human embryonic stem cells should not be funded in the European union s upcoming Horizon 2020 research programme.
The engineered maize seeds produced proteins decorated with sugars that could be converted to human forms.
and seeds are ideal for long-term protein storage. However, Kermode says, the transgenic crops should be grown in contained greenhouses to prevent them from escaping into the environment.
Enzymes purified from the engineered seeds are functional, but they have not yet been tested in cells, let alone humans.
The team also needs to ensure that the seeds produce the protein in higher quantities.
Stem-cell bid Tom Okarma and Michael West former chief executives of biotechnology firm Geron, sent the company s shareholders a letter bidding for its stem-cell assets on 18 Â October.
Geron, based in Menlo Park, California, spent more than a decade developing a spinal-cord-injury treatment derived from human embryonic stem cells
and performed early clinical testing in 2010. But John Scarlett, the company s current chief executive, shut down the programme last November,
and most make their homes high up in the branches of trees, yet when this habit started has been a contentious issue.
and often uneven, branches. Moreover, the trait is found almost exclusively in arboreal animals.""We really think this closes the question of where the first primates were living,
its output second only to that of the United states. Fermenting the sugars in the country s abundant sugar cane produced a motor fuel that lowered carbon dioxide emissions,
Forty-one of the country s roughly 400 sugar-cane ethanol plants have closed over that time.
Rather than developing new plantations, the industry fell back on harvesting cane from older less-productive sites,
technical director and acting president of UNICA, Brazil s sugar-cane industry association, the government knows that the situation is unsustainable.
second-generation ethanol, produced from the tough cellulose in plant stalks. Cellulose is difficult to break down and ferment,
In December last year, the Brazilian Development Bank launched a 1-billion-real (US$481-million) credit line to stimulate research and development in cellulosic biofuels and other advanced sugar-cane technologies.
The Center for Sugarcane Technology, an industry-sponsored organization based in S £o Paulo has taken up a 357-million-real loan to build a cellulosic ethanol plant next year,
which would use waste plant matter from conventional sugar-cane fermentation.""We can double fuel yield per hectare
"Nothing shall compete with conventional sugar-cane ethanol until 2050
Pig geneticists go the whole hogt. J. Tabasco is something of a porcine goddess at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where her ruddy,
The fungus, Exserohilum rostratum, is a plant-eating generalist equipped with a spore-launching mechanism ideal for going airborne,
but only distantly related, fungi with multicellular dark spores that were causing disease in grains such as corn.
He named one new genus he had created Exserohilum for the prominent protuberances called hila (the belly buttons of the fungal and botanical world) on its spores.
while alive and not really do much damage until the leaf senesces. Leonard found E. rostratum on corn, sorghum and Johnsongrass fairly often,
and stalks when insects drilled into the plant, creating a convenient landing pad of dying tissue for the fungus.
Most often the fungus shows up on grasses and other monocots plants often distinguished by flower parts in threes and parallel leaf venation such as pineapples, bananas and sugarcane,
It's just a really common fungus in the environment that mostly lives on dead and dying plant tissue,
The fungus can grow from a single spore to a lawn of freshly spore-crowned fungal filaments on a piece of dried leaf in two days flat faster and more abundantly than any other related species he studied.
or dead leaf tissue once conditions are right, Leonard says. So that would be another reason E. rostratum would be a likely candidate for showing up in a messy lab
The spores have based a static electricity ejection system designed to launch them into the air with ease.
as if programmed, the ant plunges its mandibles into the juicy main vein of a leaf and soon dies.
Within days the stem of a fungus sprouts from the dead ant's head. After growing a stalk,
the fungus casts spores to the ground below, where they can be picked up by other passing ants.
This strange cycle of undead life and death has been documented well and has earned the culprit the moniker:
Eventually, an affected ant will stop on the underside of one leaf, roughly 25 centimeters from the forest floor,
and clamp down on the leaf's main vein. This position appears to be optimal for the fungus's later stage in
which it ejects spores onto the soil directly below.)Biting leaves is not normal ant behavior.
when the infected ant bites onto the leaf vein in it's so-called death grip this atrophy causes it to have lockjaw,
destroying the launching point for the fungus's spores. By that stage, cells from the fungus have grown even more numerous in the ant's body.
About two to three days later a fungal stalk will start to emerge from the back of the ant's head.
After maturing over the course of weeks the stalk's head will shoot spores onto the soil below.
Researchers have discovered also that this relatively slow-growing fungus can have its main stem broken off and regrow it later.
Foraging worker ants can unwittingly pick up spores as they pass by. The death of an ant outside of its colony and subsequent growth of the fungal stalk might be key adaptations of the fungus,
researchers have hazarded. Ants quickly remove dead nest mates so that dying in the nest would not allow sufficient time for stalk development
and spore release before the dead host ant was ejected, Hughes and his colleagues noted in their BMC Ecology paper.
The doomed ants do not wander too far afield, often ending up within meters of their familiar territory.
grow and propagate its spores. A specialized but global threat The ants best known for getting zombified by the Ophiocordyceps fungus are tree-dwelling carpenter ants found in Brazil and Thailand,
Research published in Biology Letters in 2010 describes a 48-million-year-old fossilized leaf from Germany that bears the distinctive scars of a bite from an ant's mandible on its main vein.
Andersen and her colleagues have found that a different breed of fungi grow over the ant corpse and the emerging fungus stalk.
By covering the original fungus and its stalk, this secondary fungus or hyperparasite effectively prevents the zombie-ant fungus from ejecting its spores.
It looks like they completely sterilize it, Andersen says of the second-level parasite. Even these hyperparasites seem to be specialized for growing on specific parasitizing fungi.
But, if another parasite renders more than half of its mature spores infertile (and more still failing to reproduce due to other interferences),
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