In the household energy and food and agriculture sectors, the proposal with the biggest impact on both climate change and public health was a 10-year programme in India to replace 150 million indoor biomass-burning
Mexico's transgenic maize under fire: Nature Newsmexico doesn't have an adequate system to monitor
or protect natural maize (corn) varieties from transgenes, say prominent scientists concerned about the experimental planting of genetically modified crops.
In the past month, Monsanto and Dow Agrisciences have received government permission to plant transgenic maize across 24 plots,
covering a total of nearly 13 hectares, in the northern states of Sonora, Sinaloa, Chihuahua, Coahuila and Tamaulipas.
The planting of transgenic maize had been prohibited for 11 years in Mexico, where maize was domesticated first.
and federal officials say that they are implementing controls to prevent gene flow. Ariel  lvarez Morales, executive secretary of the Mexican Inter-Secretarial Commission on Biosafety of Genetically Modified Organisms, described the experimental planting as a compliance trial to see how the companies
and the plants perform. We want to see how the planting will work in these conditions,
transgenic maize is kept 500 metres away from conventional maize fields, says Eduardo Perez Pico, the firm's chief of research and regulatory affairs for the Latin american region.
There is no way to stop gene flow to the native crops, says signatory Montgomery Slatkin, a geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley.
Greenpeace and other groups filed a legal challenge, which the government has rejected. If Mexico experimentally plants transgenic maize,
it should be done with ideal experiments and a great capacity to monitor them but we don't have either,
n Kermez, a Mexican biologist who has served in top ministerial posts and is a former rector of the Autonomous National University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico city.
and equip staff at two reference labs for transgene testing in Mexico city. The firm, Genetic ID, is a spin-off by John Fagan of the Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa,
which favours organic crops and transcendental meditation. Â lvarez Morales says the firm was chosen because of its widely known analytical techniques.
But geneticist Elena Alvarez-Buylla of UNAM's Institute of Ecology in Mexico city, questions whether the company's methods are sensitive enough to detect transgenes after several generations of plant growth.
Earlier this year, her group reported that Genetic ID failed to detect transgenes in blinded samples1.
Genetic ID responded that Alvarez-Buylla's results were due to sample contamination2, which she challenged3.
Jay Reichman, an authority on transgenic testing with the US Environmental protection agency in Corvallis, Oregon, says that overall the combined evidence suggests that at least two transgenes were present within the plant tissues in question.
In particular Reichman noted that Alvarez-Buylla showed newly grown test plants believed to harbour transgenes were resistant to herbicide,
indicating that they bore transgenes just like commercial seeds modified to be herbicide resistant. Fagan disputes the criticism.
Still, he too is against transgenic planting, citing the potential contamination of native maize: It is very, very unacceptable.
See also'Maize genome sequenced'.
Maize genome mapped: Nature Newsplant biologists have something special to be thankful for this US Thanksgiving day.
The genome of maize (corn) a staple crop first introduced by Native americans to the European settlers centuries ago has finally been sequenced.
The genetic secrets of maize, one of the world's most widely grown grains, should accelerate efforts to develop improved crop varieties to meet the world's growing hunger for food, animal feed and fuel.
The genome is really a tremendous resource, says John Doebley, a maize geneticist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was involved not in the project.
It gives us a tool for mapping genes that we didn't have before. The four-year
US$31-million project to sequence maize (Zea mays) was led by a US-based consortium of researchers who decoded the genome of an inbred line of maize called B73, an important commercial crop variety.
The 2. 3-billion-base sequence the largest genetic blueprint yet worked out for any plant species includes more than 32,000 protein-coding genes spread across maize's 10 chromosomes.
Sections of DNA called transposable elements, which can move around the genome and cause mutations, are the most abundant parts of the sequence,
spanning almost 85%of the genome. What we have here is a crucial part of the instruction manual for how you breed a better corn plant
says Richard Wilson, director of the Genome Center at Washington University in St louis, Missouri, who led the maize-genome project.
You can now find where genes that underlie certain traits are located, and, thus, you have the tools for how you go off
and breed those desired traits into new generations of plants. Joachim Messing, director of the Plant Genome Initiative at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New jersey,
who was involved not in the sequencing, says he was surprised by how well previous analyses based on small snippets of the genome predicted some of the overall trends.
Practically all the things that we had forecast before could be validated with the entire sequence he says.
The newly minted genome was published today in Science1, together with 13 companion analyses in Science and the Public library of Science Genetics.
After sequencing their first maize genome, researchers then tackled other corn varieties for comparison. Luis Herrera-Estrella and his colleagues at the Research and Advanced Studies Center of the National Polytechnic institute (CINVESTAV) in Irapuato, Mexico, sequenced a maize variety from the Mexican highlands called Palomero.
This ancient strain, ideal for making popcorn, diverged from B73 about 9, 000 years ago around the time that maize was domesticated first from the grass teosinte.
The team report that the Palomero genome is around 400 million nucleotides smaller and contains about 20%less repetitive DNA than B732.
You can contain three Arabidopsis genomes or one rice genome in the size difference between those two maize genomes, notes Virginia Walbot,
a molecular biologist who studies maize at Stanford university in Palo alto, California, and is an author of one of the Public library of Science Genetics papers3.
These size differences that have arisen in the time of domestication and plant breeding are really major.
Herrera-Estrella's team also found more than a dozen genes related to heavy-metal detoxification and environmental-stress tolerance that were conserved in B73 and Palomero,
but that were absent from teosinte, suggesting that these genes were involved in the domestication process2.
Peering back into the geological record the researchers realized that there were frequent volcanic eruptions 8, 500-10,500 years ago in the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt a region close to the cradle of maize domestication that dumped heavy metals into the local soils.
The conservation of the metal-detoxification and stress-tolerance genes in the derived strains strongly suggests that environmental changes caused by volcanic activity represented an important driving force that acted early in maize domestication,
Herrera-Estrella says. Another team, led by Edward Buckler, a maize geneticist with the US Department of agriculture's Agricultural research service who is based at Cornell University in Ithaca,
New york, sequenced part of the gene-rich region of 27 maize varieties to map haplotypes groups of genes that tend to stick together
and probably share a common function or origin. This'Hapmap'revealed thousands of genes around the centres of the chromosomes, where they were unlikely to be shuffled around during recombination, the process in
which paired strands of DNA are separated and swapped around during cell division4. Recombination is necessary for plant breeders to unite favourable genes from different crop varieties in a single plant.
So, without much recombination, effectively, there are thousands of genes that are recalcitrant to breeding efforts
says Buckler. He notes that this could explain why farmers often need to crossbreed, or hybridize, different inbred lines to produce the superior corn varieties that we tend to eat.
The higher quality of hybrids can also be chalked up to different corn varieties harbouring non-overlapping
and complementary sets of genes, says maize geneticist Patrick Schnable, an author on the genome paper1.
In a separate study, Schnable and his colleagues at Iowa State university in Ames compared the genome structures of B73 with those of another inbred line called Mo17.
They found hundreds of genes that appeared only once in one or other of the two genomes5.
This suggests that crossing the two varieties could produce hybrids containing a higher number of beneficial genes.
The maize Hapmap also promises to make combining desirable genes easier, notes Buckler. That's because researchers can test seeds for DNA markers that flag up the presence of particular haplotypes,
The resource can also be used to produce heartier corn varieties by systematically scanning the genome for genes that underlie key traits,
This genome will allow us to develop tools to make their jobs a little easier.
A combination of two gene regions, known as rbcl and matk, will be used as a'bar code'to uniquely identify every species of land plant, biologists announced last week at the Third International Barcode of Life Conference
The two-gene identifier beat a pair of other proposals put forward by the 52-member plant working group of the Consortium for the Barcode of Life in July (see go. nature. com/nztuhw.
The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) study pointed to the ample financial returns of investment in protecting natural areas such as mangroves, tropical forests and grasslands.
Five gene-synthesis companies in a new International Gene Synthesis Consortium have adopted practices that are intended to address the biosecurity risks of the technology.
The consortium's members will screen incoming orders against a single database still being developed that contains gene sequences identified as potentially hazardous by authoritative groups,
The consortium will compete for members with the International Association of Synthetic biology, based in Heidelberg, Germany,
The audit included the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, which handles samples of H1n1 pandemic flu,
and which earlier this year lost track of 22 vials containing harmless Ebola-virus genetic material.
at a workshop at the European space agency's centre for Earth observation in Frascati, Italy. www. congrex. nl/09c26 21 NOVEMBER Part of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act takes effect in the United states. The act,
and health-insurance coverage on the basis of genetic information. go. nature. com/Vlym5n News maker Lee Myung-bakthe president of South korea is backing a plan to increase total R&d spending
Lee created an impressive list of cloned and transgenic canines. Among them were three female afghan hounds (Bona, Hope and Peace, who Lee calls Snuppy's girlfriends,
and the first transgenic dog (a beagle, known as Ruby Puppy, or Ruppy, that has red fluorescent protein that makes its nose,
says mouse cloning pioneer Teruhiko Wakayama of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan.
will become more widely used through cloning and transgenics. But Wakayama wonders whether dogs will ever catch on as model animals
or transgenic dogs could be somewhat problematic due to the prime place of the dog in human affections,
says Colman, now at the A*STAR Institute of Medical Biology in Singapore. Still, Lee's cloned
and transgenic dogs are piquing interest. He is collaborating with both the US National Institute of Allergy
and Infectious diseases to study chronic granulomatous disease, a rare genetic white blood cell disorder, and the University of South carolina to study Alzheimer's disease.
Brain science Institute behavioural geneticist Shigeyoshi Itohara is excited most about what the clones could reveal about the function of the brain.
With the differences between species in disposition and cognition, dogs are tremendously valuable to basic genetic studies of higher brain order.
By getting rid of the genetic variation among individuals within a species, cloned dogs will significantly raise the value of this data
Both laboratories are working on transgenic pigs that can produce tissues for transplant into humans. What we are doing is really
Lee has cloned dogs with RNL Bio, a Seoul-based company spun out from Seoul National University
This includes building a processing plant to produce an experimental biological control agent, a nucleopolyhedrovirus,
'Massagee, whose symptoms hinted at a novel condition involving genes that control muscle formation, in fact received a diagnosis that already exists in the medical literature,
the director of the programme and clinical director at the National Human genome Research Institute in Bethesda says that of approximately 2, 500 inquiries,
So far, one new disease with a genetic underpinning has been discovered in a family with blood-vessel calcification below the waist.
The genetic pathway involved, says Gahl, was known not to be associated with ectopic calcification. I think it's important.
The issue also included a four-page report by two evolutionary biologists, who disputed Williamson's hypothesis on the basis of published genome size data.
Satellites beam in biomass estimates: Nature Newswhatever agreement emerges from the climate meeting in Copenhagen,
the first satellite-based estimates of the biomass contained in the world's tropical forests. Current biomass estimates for the tropics are gathered based on data by the Food and agriculture organization of the united nations (FAO),
and their quality varies greatly from country to country. As a result, baseline figures for biomass are some of the biggest uncertainties in calculating emissions from deforestation and forest degradation,
recently estimated to be around 15%of global carbon emissions (G r. van der Werf et al. Nature Geosci. 2, 737-738;
But Saatchi says that the study provides additional information about biomass levels at regional and national levels.
You need to know how biomass is distributed and how it's changing over time, almost everywhere, with some resolution and accuracy.
Also at Copenhagen, researchers at the Woods Hole Research center in Massachusetts presented another pantropical biomass assessment,
Richard Houghton, a biomass expert at Woods Hole says that it is good news that multiple teams are tackling the big-picture question of tropical forest biomass.
We need a couple of independent estimates just to see how well they match, he says. Anybody can make a map.
Asner has developed also a system for assessing biomass at finer resolution, which will be necessary if forests are going to be linked to international carbon markets.
The new pantropical biomass maps from Saatchi and Woods Hole won't accomplish that goal, but they can provide scientists and policy-makers with a better understanding of carbon trends.
Asner has found that deforestation in Brazil is moving into higher biomass areas in the interior of the forest.
Biotech boost: The European life-sciences sector was perked up by its first large initial public offering for almost two years, after Belgian biotech firm Movetis raised  85 million (US$128 million) on its 3 december debut.
Backed by venture-capital investment, Movetis has European approval to market a constipation drug, prucalopride (Resolor).
is caused by a morbillivirus a group of viruses that also includes measles. Clinical signs include fever, discharges from the eyes and nose, diarrhoea and dehydration.
a vaccine containing the attenuated virus that was heat-stable and could be stored and transported over long distances.
Oura says that the biggest scientific challenge in eradicating the virus is the large-scale monitoring
and surveillance needed to ensure that the virus is gone. It's a huge task when you have the virus in developing countries and war zones, such as Somalia,
to carry out monitoring and surveillance, he says. By the 1970s, smallpox, too, was found only in the war-torn Horn of Africa,
Because it contains the live virus diagnostic tests can't differentiate between infected and vaccinated animals,
as both will test positive for antibodies against the virus. Cows also pass on antibodies to their offspring through their milk.
whether the virus has been eradicated, vaccinations must stop for a period of two years and calves younger than two years old then need to be tested.
of which governments and laboratories around the world are keeping a stock of the virus for research purposes.
The index is calculated based on an area's biological potential to store carbon and the local opportunity costs of protecting forests rather than cutting them down for timber,
The disease is caused by a virus called a morbillivirus a group that also includes the measles virus. Clinical signs include fever, discharges from the eyes and nose,
when a heat-stable vaccine was developed that contained the attenuated virus, allowing the vaccine to be stored
Oura says that the biggest scientific challenges in eradicating the virus is the large-scale monitoring
and surveillance needed to ensure that the virus is gone. It's a huge task when you have the virus in developing countries and war zones, such as Somalia,
to carry out monitoring and surveillance, he says. Although the vaccine can provide lifelong protection, it has caused also some problems.
Because it contains the live virus diagnostic tests can't differentiate between infected and vaccinated animals,
as both will test positive for antibodies against the virus. Cows also pass on antibodies to their offspring through their milk.
To evaluate whether the virus has been eradicated, vaccinations must stop for a period of two years and calves less than two years old tested.
of which governments and laboratories around the world are keeping a stock of the virus. Â
immune health and gene expression (I e. Mulder et al. BMC Biol. 7, 79; 2009). ) Until now, she says,
that link had been circumstantial. There has been a lot of hearsay around gut microbiota and how it influences immune function and susceptibility to diseases and allergies.
Kelly's team also found that the differences in gut microbes affected the expression of genes associated with the piglets'immune systems.
Animals raised in the isolated environment expressed more genes involved in inflammatory immune responses and cholesterol synthesis,
whereas genes linked with infection-fighting T cells were expressed in the outdoor-bred pigs. Glenn Gibson, a food microbiologist at the University of Reading, UK, says that previous studies have suggested that immune responses are linked to organisms in the gut.
This study takes a step forwards by tallying the gene expression response into this, he says. However, he adds
because the study was carried out in pigs, there is no way to be certain that the results are relevant to humans.
Altered microbe makes biofuel: Nature Newsin a bid to overcome the drawbacks of existing biofuels,
researchers have engineered a bacterium that can convert a form of raw plant biomass directly into clean, road-ready diesel.
So far, biofuels have largely been limited to ethanol, which is harder to transport than petrol
and is made from crop plants such as maize (corn) and sugarcane, putting vehicles in competition with hungry mouths.
and the biotech firm LS9 of South San francisco, California, among others describe a potential solution:
a modified Escherichia coli bacterium that can make biodiesel directly from sugars or hemicellulose, a component of plant fibre (see page 559).
It's a nice milestone in the field of biofuels, and it has a lot of promise for actually being commercialized,
says James Liao, a metabolic engineer and synthetic biologist at the University of California, Los angeles. LS9's calculations, performed with the help of the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois,
show that the biodiesel that it is preparing to market reduces greenhouse-gas emissions by 85%compared with standard diesel.
LS9 says that the shift from sugars to biomass as a feedstock would reduce greenhouse gases even further.
eliminating the need for additives and then folding in the ability to use hemicellulose as a feedstock.
This paper is a representation of the types of efforts that are going to move us to biomass,
The team then inserted genes from other bacteria to produce enzymes able to break down hemicellulose.
In all the authors report more than a dozen genetic modifications. The results could buoy LS9, says Mark B Â nger,
or alleles, of each of its genes, one inherited from its mother and one from its father.
Wang suggests that the Qinling pandas carry a dominant gene for black fur and a recessive gene for brown fur.
when they inherit the recessive brown gene from both mother and father. The chances that both parents have the brown allele are ordinarily very low,
suggests Wang. But the coincidence would be much more likely if the pandas were related closely.
Conservationists worry about such inbreeding because it means that more animals rely on the same set of genetic defences to overcome environmental threats,
These anecdotal observations strongly suggest the presence of a recessive gene or genes, says Wang.
The idea is worth investigating, says Sheng-guo Fang, a researcher at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China,
who has studied the morphology and genetics of the Qinling pandas. But there could be other factors at play,
or more pigmentation genes, says Fang. The Qinling Mountains have shaped brown subspecies of other mammals,
The idea of inbreeding in Qinling is also at odds with the most recent genetic analyses,
the remaining giant panda populations seem to have retained a lot of genetic diversity2. The evidence that giant pandas in general,
and in the Qinling Mountains in particular, are of low genetic variation is at best equivocal, says Mike Bruford, a molecular ecologist at Cardiff University, UK,
The giant panda genome, which was published online in Nature last month3, also revealed little sign of inbreeding, says Jun Wang of the Beijing Genomics Institute in Shenzhen, China.
But the genome is likely to prove invaluable for solving the mystery of the brown pandas of Qinling.
There are over 125 genes known to affect pigmentation in mice says Hopi Hoekstra, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard university in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
and an expert on pigmentation in mammals. There are definitely a good handful of candidate genes you could sequence in the two morphs
and look for differences, she says. Jun Wang and his colleagues are already on the case.
So far, they have studied the sequence of some 50 genes known to be involved in pigmentation.
A comparison of brown and black pandas at Qinling and other sites should shed light on the genetic basis of this rare variety,
he says.
Carbon credits proposed for whale conservation: Nature Newsbiological oceanographer Andrew Pershing wants carbon credits for whale conservation.
total whale biomass today is less than one-fifth of what it was in 1900, before whaling decimated the population.
Oregon, could eventually sequester 9 million tonnes of carbon in their combined biomass. He compares it to planting trees.
and accumulate that as biomass. Whales take carbon out of the system through their food,
there could still be a substantial increase in total biomass owing to the difference in size between whales
any given food source (such as krill) can support a lot more biomass in a whale than in a small animal such as a penguin.
says Daniel Costa, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California,
And even though all of these animals'biomass combined represents a small fraction of total human carbon emissions,
says Susan Fisher, a stem-cell biologist at the University of California, San francisco, who recently submitted ten lines derived from pre-blastocyst embryos to the NIH.
The large Brazilian ethanol producer ETH Bioenergia announced on 18 february that it would take over the debt-ridden Brazilian Renewable Energy Company (Brenco) to create a world-leading company to make ethanol from biomass.
At a national US ethanol conference in Orlando, Florida, last week, biotech companies Novozymes and Genencor launched new generations of enzymes that they claim will cut the enzyme-related production costs of cellulosic ethanol
They determined that biodefence researcher Bruce Ivins was the sole perpetrator; he committed suicide in July 2008, before indictment.
2001 papers announcing the draft sequence of the human genome. 1, 968 Number of authors on 2010 paper of initial results from the Compact Muon Solenoid detector at the Large Hadron Collider.
says Alan Townsend, a biogeochemist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He agrees with Zhang's assessment that continued use at these rates could threaten China's food security.
adds that Chinese farmers could also leave dead crop biomass on the fields to help rebalance the soil.
India's transgenic aubergine in a stew: Nature Newsindia's government has refused to allow commercial cultivation of what would have been the country's first genetically modified (GM) food crop.
but some scientists say that it will set back Indian plant-biotechnology research. On 9 february, environment minister Jairam Ramesh announced an indefinite moratorium on the cultivation of a transgenic version of aubergine,
or brinjal, that is insect-resistant. The crop carries a gene from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt),
and was developed by Mahyco-Monsanto Biotech, a joint venture between the Jalna-based Maharashtra Hybrid Seed Company and the US seed giant Monsanto,
based in St louis county, Missouri. Bt brinjal was approved for cultivation by India's Genetic engineering Approval Committee (GEAC), a scientific regulatory body, in October 2009.
But stiff opposition from activists then forced the government to put off commercial release until further discussions were held (see'Transgenic aubergines put on ice'.
'This week's announcement follows public consultations that were held in seven cities across the country. A 19-page statement issued by Ramesh said that his ministry had decided to impose a moratorium on the release of Bt brinjal until independent scientific studies had established that it would not adversely affect the environment or human health.
and to set up an independent regulatory authority for GM CROPS. Mahyco spokesperson Raju Barwale said that the company respected the decision of the environment ministry.
the founding director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular biology in Hyderabad and an active campaigner against Bt brinjal, added that he was pleased with the precedent-setting decision.
and worry that the ruling could delay the introduction of other GM CROPS developed by Indian scientists,
Our national labs have all the genes for rice improvement, we do need not Monsanto, says Govindarajan Padmanabhan, a biochemist and former director of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore.
The moratorium will actually affect the indigenous effort to create GM CROPS that could feed India's rapidly growing population
he said. We have no less than ten GM products to get into the regulatory system for trials including brinjal, chickpea, sorghum, sugar cane, castor oil plant,
project director for plant biotechnology at the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) in New delhi.
But Chaveli Kameswara Rao, secretary of the Foundation for Biotechnology Awareness and Education a biotech advocacy group based in Bangalore,
believes that it will have a broader impact. A lot of people in crop biotech will be devastated. No money will come for research,
and students rushing to get degrees in biotechnology will stop, he says. It is bad for the country.
But Maharaj Kishan Bhan, secretary for the Indian government's Department of Biotechnology which, together with ICAR, funds the majority of GM crop research disagrees.
I do not think our funding will told decrease, he Nature. This year we are putting maximum emphasis on research in agricultural and environmental biotechnology.
Kameswara Rao points out that even if Bt brinjal cannot be grown legally farmers may start cultivating it anyway,
Ramanjaneyulu believes that the environment ministry should now confiscate the transgenic brinjal seeds held by Mahyco.
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