but expanding bioscience community (see'Turkish law could cripple bioscience'and'An absurd law').'The law was intended originally to control the use of GM plants in agriculture,
which at a stroke outlawed much useful molecular biological research and introduced lengthy bureaucratic approval procedures for each experiment that involved genetic manipulation.
Turkey's president did not intervene and ask parliament to reconsider, as some scientists had hoped,
Now a group of scientists have taken a deeper look at the African elephants'genetic ancestry. The researchers sequenced the nuclear genomes of both types of African elephant
as well as that of the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus). ) They also extracted and sequenced DNA from the extinct woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) and mastodon (Mammut americanum) ancient elephant ancestors.
By comparing all these genomes, the team found that the forest and savanna elephants diverged into separate species between 2. 6 and 5. 6 million years ago.
says David Reich, a population geneticist at Harvard Medical school in Boston, Massachusetts, and a lead author on the study.
says Thomas Gilbert, a geneticist at the University of Copenhagen. But this study really hammers the coffin shut on any arguments that the forest
as this genetic material is inherited solely from the mother. Examining the nuclear genome which is around 200,000 times larger than that contained in mitochondria,
gives a broader and more accurate picture of elephants'history. You get a different picture by looking at nuclear DNA,
the forest elephant gene pool would become diluted and displaced by that of the savanna elephants,
What we see is an ancient split with a bit of gene flow more recently, he says.
The mandated levels of biofuel production in the United states will increase to 53 billion litres in 2011 about 8%of the country's total fuel consumption
Around 90%of the biofuel will come from conventional corn ethanol next year, with the remainder coming from biodiesel and other advanced biofuels.
however, the US Environmental protection agency pulled back the 2011 requirement for cellulosic biofuels from 946 million to 25 million litres,
and a lack of financing to scale up basic research and development (see'Biofuel blues',left). The US Department of energy has supported biofuels through research grants,
including $30 million for research into next generation biofuels announced last week, but has yet to finalize any loan guarantees for companies wanting to build pilot plants.
Although industry officials say that the programme's requirements for granting loans are too burdensome,
Cellulosic ethanol producers are trying to generate fuel from biomass such as leaves and branches. These feedstocks have the advantage that they are plentiful
Steve Long, a crop scientist and deputy director of the Energy Biosciences Institute in Urbana, Illinois, says companies are struggling to overcome a suite of financial,
aims to increase food security by finding genetic traits that might be suited to future climates. 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.
The report examines the scientific evidence used by the FBI to accuse microbiologist Bruce Ivins of the attacks,
and helped to launch the field of proteomics. In 2005, Fenn lost a legal battle over the patent rights to Yale university in New haven, Connecticut,
Business Biotech bid On 8 december US pharmaceutical giant Johnson & johnson issued a long-awaited public offer to buy Crucell,
a biotechnology firm headquartered in Leiden, The netherlands. Johnson & johnson, in New brunswick, New jersey, offered to pay ¢ 1. 75 billion (US$2. 3 billion) for Crucell,
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.
and found which genes we should focus on to tackle it, says study author Sophien Kamoun, a plant pathologist and head of the Sainsbury Laboratory, a not-for-profit plant science company in Norwich,
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,
and compared these genomes with the genome of the previously sequenced P. infestans. They discovered that the pathogens shared many'housekeeping'genes,
including that for spore generation, but that they also had made numerous regions up of non-coding repeated DNA sequences.
Genes were sparser in these regions, but most were associated with pathogenicity, having roles such as suppressing host immunity
These genes varied between the species, either in their sequence or in the number of copies present.
the researchers say that the function of these genes and the variation between the sister species suggests that these regions are involved in the evolution and adaption of the pathogen to new hosts.
It seems that the genes for host adaptation are in the DNA-repeat-rich regions,
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
and his team found that B. graminis genes responsible for infection and pathogenicity are located also in areas of the genome that are enriched with non-coding DNA repeats.
Evolution seems to be going on in these islands, he says. Commenting on the potato blight paper,
there is a big risk that we will run out of options for natural genetic resistance, says Spanu.
The USDA let biotech'stecklings'be planted, which are designed to produce GM seeds, not sugar beet directly.
2010), was set to be succeeded by Canadian biologist Alan Bernstein until it emerged last week that US citizenship was a requirement for the job.
Instead, the company is focusing on other chemicals thought to activate the same biological pathway as resveratrol.
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
but the genus Satsuma contains both dextral and sinistral species. In most land snails, the switch between dextrality and sinistrality is controlled by a single gene,
meaning that reversals are likely to occur frequently. However, sinistral Satsuma snails cannot mate with their dextral relatives,
leading scientists to wonder how left-coiling individuals arising from random genetic mutation would be able to find sexual partners.
leading to reproductive isolation and the evolution of entirely new species. This could change the general view of evolutionary genetics,
We've found that a single gene can have major effects on speciation and adaptation simultaneously.
And a DNA-based family tree of the snail genus showed that sinistrality has arisen independently at least six times in Satsuma
Nature Newspolicy Business People Research Trend watch Coming up Policy German GM CROPS The highest court in Germany has upheld a law that makes planters of genetically modified (GM CROPS liable
Patient protection US President Barack Obama has asked his bioethics commission to review the recent discovery that US government-funded scientists intentionally infected subjects with syphilis in a study in Guatemala in the 1940s (see Nature 467,645;
the European Association for Bioindustries and European Biopharmaceutical Enterprises. People Murder in Iran Majid Shahriari, an Iranian nuclear physicist, was killed
and a range of other factors that would have economic impacts such as forestry and biodiversity loss.
and will look at changes to biodiversity and the resources and processes provided by the ecosystem as the forest is logged
Other projects have focused mainly on a single issue such as trees or biodiversity. For instance, the project will look at which animal species survive in a forest as the level of logging intensifies until the land is converted fully into an oil-palm plantation.
We want to use the data to optimally design future forest clearance for agricultural income and biodiversity.
Debra Brock, a molecular biologist at Rice university in Houston, Texas, who led the study, attributes this gap in our knowledge to the fact that very few labs work on wild Dictyostelium.
Michael Purugganan, a biologist at New york University, sees the husbandry practice of Dictyostelium as having intriguing parallels with human farming societies
Arrivals include Nobel laureate Timothy Hunt (pictured), a biologist at the London Research Institute of Cancer Research UK.
Transgenic chickens curb bird flu transmission: Nature Newsresearchers have made genetically modified chickens that can't infect other birds with bird flu.
The birds carry a genetic tweak that diverts an enzyme crucial for transmitting the H5n1 strain.
the molecular decoy somehow impedes the virus from infecting others. The findings are published today in Science1.
says Laurence Tiley, a molecular virologist at the University of Cambridge, UK, and lead investigator for the study.
His team is now working on further genetic tweaks that would inhibit the virus in different ways.
says Ilaria Capua, head of virology at the Experimental Animal health Care Institute of Venice in Legnaro, Italy.
So far, the virus has not been able to spread from human to human, but some public health experts worry that eventually it will adapt to do so.
What's more, flu viruses mutate quickly and are famous for evading vaccines. If made commercially available,
They carry a genetic'cassette'dubbed a short-hairpin RNA, which includes genetic sequences that match up with an enzyme that influenza viruses use for replication and packaging.
These sequences can bind with the enzyme, somehow stopping it from working with the virus. The enzyme could mutate to evade this decoy,
but if it did so it would no longer be able to match up with its binding sites on the virus. So for the virus to escape,
it would need to simultaneously change its own genome and that of the enzyme in eight different spots a highly unlikely event.
The chickens were modified by a team led by Helen Sang, a geneticist at the Roslin Institute of the University of Edinburgh, UK.
The researchers modified the chickens by injecting a lentivirus carrying the cassette into clusters of cells on top of egg yolks.
In some of the resulting chicks, the cassette integrates into germ cells. These animals can be crossbred to produce chickens that carry the cassette in every cell.
some with the transgene and some without. Most of the birds that received the primary infection died,
The researchers found that the amount of virus present in the infected GM birds was not significantly different from that in non-transgenic controls.
that the hairpin disrupts the packaging of the virus, preventing it from being taken up normally in the next animal.
it costs approximately £50, 000 (US$79, 000) to produce a small number of stable transgenic birds you can characterize
She and Tiley argue that getting similar transgenic birds into global production would be possible
says Marc Van Ranst, a virologist at the Dutch-speaking Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium.
says Karel Schat, a virologist and immunologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New york. Schat is paid a consultant for another company that is also funding research on using transgenes for disease resistance.
Scientists are excited. But it may well be that people at the higher level of the companies are trying to be a little bit more careful.
which are a reservoir of biodiversity and carbon, he adds. More a confirmation than a surprise was that in the past 15 years
The report leaves out details on issues such as land use, biofuel and climate change, as these will be addressed in future studies by the agencies'joint interdisciplinary Agrimonde platform,
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
Missouri, are also working on transgenic maize varieties, hoping to tap into a multibillion-dollar market (see Nature 466,548-551;
Whereas resistance to a particular herbicide might be pinned down to one gene, the response to drought plays out across the genome.
The industry researchers identified thousands of genes associated with drought tolerance then incorporated them into their hybrids through conventional breeding.
Last year, South africa was home to the first field trial for a transgenic drought-tolerant maize crop,
incorporating a gene from the variety currently under development by Monsanto. Meanwhile, CIMMYT recently partnered with the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable agriculture,
Business Biofuel offering Gevo, a company that genetically modifies microbes to produce chemicals from plant sugars,
and biofuels threatens the rights and livelihoods of millions of people who live in tropical forests, according to a report launched in London on 8 february.
Coming up 22 23 february In La jolla, California, leading genetics researchers gather to discuss the promise of human genomics over the next decade. go. nature. com/w8zzsx 23 february NASA's Glory
said last week that retractions are under way of 6 further papers produced by current and former members of its immunology group,
Polar Biol. doi: 10.1007/s00300-010-0952-3; 2011). ) The calculated total over the period, some 950,000 tonnes, is still small.
Maryland, pinpointed the genetic mutation that causes a rare artery-hardening condition (C. St Hilaire et al.
The biomarker developed by Rutkove, of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical center in Boston, Massachusetts, detects diseased muscle tissue by sending electrical currents through the body.
The ALS biomarker award was launched in 2006 by Prize4life, a foundation based in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
which include better mimicking of the natural cycles of forest regeneration through fire and insects, would make the wood produced there the most environmentally preferable in the world,
a biologist who studies this subject at California State university, Fullerton. Many fish may provide a hugely important link between terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems,
Biodiversity's ills not all down to climate change: Nature Newsclimate change is affecting the world in many ways.
But attempts to directly link local changes in species distribution and biodiversity to climate warming hold little promise, ecologists warn in Nature Climate Change1.
First author Camille Parmesan, a population biologist at the University of Texas in Austin, explains why.
You can, of course, attribute various individual biological changes to climate events, and even climate change, provided you have long-term studies.
Climate change is impacting biodiversity worldwide. Spring comes, on average, two weeks earlier. Almost two-thirds of species, including many birds, frogs, butterflies, trees and grassland flowers, breed or bloom earlier.
Some people want to deconstruct any observed biological change into separate causes and put percentage figures on them.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) supports an evermore-detailed approach to biological attribution not least to inform conservation efforts.
But biology and ecology are fundamentally different from and I argue more complex than climate science humans are doing much more harm to wild species than just adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
Nature Newsan international treaty aimed at protecting and improving access to the world's plant genetic resources has obtained more than US$10 million from donors to fund its second round of research grants for helping
The funding was confirmed at a meeting of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture this week in Bali, Indonesia.
signatories are legally bound to pass on genetic information about the world's 64 most important food crops,
which can be held in gene banks or on farms, is freely available to researchers, plant breeders and farmers.
and Bhatti had feared that some projects would not be funded (See Boost for conservation of plant gene assets).
zar, a geneticist who works on hunger and poverty issues at the University of Cordoba in Spain,
says that conserving global plant genetic diversity is the only way to develop crops that are adapted to changing climates and resistant to new diseases.
The clearances, a response to rising demand for food and biofuel, released as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as the entire UK transport sector does in a year.
Like most forests, peat-swamp forests store large amounts of carbon above ground as biomass
Koh and his colleagues calculate that this conversion led to the release of about 140 million tonnes of carbon from biomass above ground
or their genes, so that less nitrogen is lost from the soil. Preliminary results show that as nitrogen concentrations in the soil rise,
there is a change in copy-number of some microbial genes that encode enzymes key to nitrogen escaping from soils.
which microbial genes are present, the researchers found. The genes present are not necessarily the ones that are active,
says Goulding. Researchers are now looking to identify the activity of these genes, not merely their presence or copy-number.
In a related experiment, they also found that soils release more nitrous oxide if they are dry
Unethical studies A meeting of the US presidential bioethics commission in WASHINGTON DC this week triggered reporting of past unethical human experiments by US researchers
Viral response plan Medical virologists from around the world gathered in WASHINGTON DC on 1 3 march to work out the details of a Global Virus Response Network.
Meeting attendees, invited by virologist Robert Gallo of the University of Maryland School of medicine in Baltimore,
health organizations and the public about existing viruses and attract scientists to the field. 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,
Trend watch Developing countries look poised to overtake industrialized countries in planting genetically modified (GM CROPS (see chart.
Brazil, Argentina, India, China and South africa together accounted for 43%of the global total of biotech crops planted commercially last year.
In 2010, Pakistan and Myanmar grew GM CROPS commercially for the first time, opting for biotech cotton. Sweden also made its first foray into commercial GM CROPS,
planting the'Amflora'high-starch potato. Coming up 3 6 march The American Association for Cancer Research hosts a conference in Vancouver,
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
but environmental campaigners such as the Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson, Arizona, bemoaned the fact that politicians had lifted protection rather than waiting for due process under the Endangered Species Act.
European networks The European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) said on 14 april that it is considering eight areas 墉 including biotechnology, smart cities and ageing 墉 in which to fund new
Virus sharing In the event of a future flu pandemic, member states of the World health organization (WHO) will send samples of flu virus to laboratories and drug makers around the world,
in return for greater access to any vaccines created. The deal announced by THE WHO on 17 april,
Research Brain atlas debuts A genetic and anatomical map of the human brain, bankrolled by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen,
The Seattle, Washington-based Allen Brain science Institute's human brain atlas (www. brain-map. org) logged gene expression patterns and biochemical activity at 1,
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.
whereas biotechnology 墉 a growing sector for other nations 墉 made up only 3%of claims.
or using biotechnology to alter its genome and increase its nutritional yield, explains Pena-Rosas.
Anything that involves biotechnology involves a level of controversy, explains Kent. But we need to be open and data-focused.
or consumers until they pass tests for biosafety in each country, says Gerard Barry, who coordinates the Golden Rice Network at the International Rice Research Institute in Los Ba  os
Golden Rice is expected to receive regulatory approval in the Philippines in 2013 and in Bangladesh in 2015, according to Ingo Potrykus, a retired geneticist at the Institute of Plant sciences in Zurich, Switzerland,
a plant geneticist and the director of the Biocassava Plus Program, based in St louis, Missouri.
And animal feed in China is loaded with additives such as antibiotics and heavy metals, making many farmers reluctant to use manure as a replacement for chemical fertilizers.
Fisher's team performed an in depth analysis of the area around the Eastern Arc Mountains of Tanzania-a biodiversity'hot spot'-to find out how the United nations'enhanced Reducing Emissions from Deforestation
increase food security and have a positive impact on biodiversity for a pretty low cost, Fisher says.
when to destroy the world's last two remaining stocks of the virus that causes smallpox.
and its effects on biological diversity. The 18 may statement came during a severe drought in provinces along the middle
Since 1989, nearly 1, 400 patients 墉 mostly haemophiliacs 墉 have sued after being infected in the 1980s by blood coagulants that were treated not to kill viruses.
but the patients are stuck with the virus. The health ministry says that it will continue to support their treatment.
Business Hepatitis approvals As expected, the US Food and Drug Administration has approved what is only the second drug to directly target the hepatitis C virus. Telaprevir (Incivek),
Its last major deal was an $8. 8-billion acquisition of biotech firm Millennium Pharmaceuticals,
Genome grants The US National institutes of health's ENCODE (Encyclopedia of DNA Elements) programme which aims to catalogue all the functional elements of the human genome,
has been granted a US$123-million expansion. On 16 may, an advisory council to the National Human genome Research Institute,
which runs the programme, approved the money to allow the agency to develop calls for research proposals.
devoted to understanding the biological pathology behind psychiatric disorders is held in Prague. go. nature. com/uxjkz1 Â
Geneticists bid to build a better bee: Nature Newsfor Scott Cornman, the honeybee genome is prized a resource,
yet he spends much of his time removing it. Cornman, a geneticist for the Bee Research Laboratory of the US Department of agriculture (USDA) in Beltsville, Maryland, is trying to characterize the various pathogens that plague the honeybee (Apis mellifera), arguably the world's most important insect.
His strategy is to subtract the honeybee genome from every other stray bit of genetic residue he can find in bee colonies, healthy and diseased.
The remaining genetic material gives a complex metagenomic portrait of other organisms that inhabit the bee's world
including viruses, bacteria and fungi some novel that, alone or in combination, might push a bee colony into precipitous decline.
Right now we're in the discovery phase, where we're trying to identify what's present,
or so researchers in attendance last week at the Honey Bee Genomics & Biology meeting, held at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New york. It was dedicated the first conference on the topic
soon after the honeybee genome was sequenced (Honeybee Genome Sequencing Consortium Nature 443,931-949; 2006), and for many it was a chance to marvel at a field transformed.
Around the same time that the genome was published first, honey  bee colonies across much of the Northern hemisphere began to show alarming declines.
which spreads harmful viruses, continue to take their toll. Annual surveys in the United states show that almost 35%of all colonies die during a typical winter.
Genomics is yielding new clues to the still-mysterious phenomenon, as well as potential strategies for protecting the insects from a multitude of threats.
and a greater prevalence of several viruses, two of which had not been detected in bees before. Yet despite having a multitude of enemies
The genome offers a window into the bees'immune pathways, Evans adds. The goal is to identify the genes that are crucial in helping bees thwart attack,
and, ultimately, to strengthen these defences. You can breed for these traits, but with genetic markers you could do it faster,
he says. In cases in which nature cannot do the job some researchers are now exploring more direct ways of boosting bees'resilience.
At the meeting, Michelle Flenniken, a virologist at the University of California, San francisco, presented evidence that, in honeybees, it can also trigger a general immune response that might ward off a variety of threats.
who is exploring the genes involved in the process. What we think we've found is a window into this new immune-response pathway.
The 9 may study examined the future of six renewable energy sources (biomass, hydro, wind, solar, geothermal and oceans).
US veterans biobank The US Department of veterans affairs (VA) hopes to enrol 1 million military veterans to form
what could be the world's largest research database linking genetic profiles with health records.
such as the UK Biobank, which has enrolled 500,000 volunteers. People New to US academy Among 72 members elected to the US National Academy of Sciences on 3 may were geneticist George Church of Harvard Medical school in Boston, Massachusetts, and Neil Shubin
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.
See go. nature. com/ax7qth for more. Trend watch A pivotal paper by chemist John Fenn saw huge numbers of citations almost immediately after its 1989 publication,
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011