Plant breeding and genetic modification could also help, by creating varieties with lower levels of acrylamide precursors.
Biodiversity cash Wealthy nations have agreed to double their support to developing countries for protecting biodiversity
The pledge was made at the United nations Convention on Biological Diversity in Hyderabad, India, which ended on 20 october.
Biofuels rethink The European commission launched an overhaul of its biofuels policies on 17 Â October,
and concerns that biofuels may produce greater greenhouse-gas emissions than fossil fuels (see Nature http://doi. org/bmssn7;
) The proposals retain a target that 10%of transport fuels should come from renewable sources by 2020 but set a 5%cap on food-based biofuels.
calling for a re-examination of biosafety data on GM CROPS already approved for field trials. See go. nature. com/kovfrc for more.
former chief executives of biotechnology firm Geron, sent the company s shareholders a letter bidding for its stem-cell assets on 18 Â October.
according to"very preliminary results presented by Sergey Bulat of the Petersburg Nuclear physics Institute in Gatchina, Russia, at the 12th European Workshop on Astrobiology in Stockholm on 16 october.
Numerous fossils of the genus have been found but, as is typical with mammals, they have all been survived teeth that owing to the presence of protective enamel.
Politics holds back animal engineerswhen she saw the trailer for the documentary Genetic Roulette, Alison Van Eenennaam wanted to laugh, then cry.
For Van Eenennaam, a geneticist at the University of California, Davis, the scientifically unfounded assertions that transgenic foods are increased responsible for incidence of autism,
But the film reflects attitudes that have thwarted Van Eenennaam s research into the genetic modification of animals to reduce food costs
In one case, James Murray, another geneticist at the University of California, Davis, was told in 2003 that the USDA had rejected his proposal to develop a goat that produces milk rich in human lysozymes enzymes that fight diarrhoeal disease
Van Eenennaam says that she might do better by disrupting the genes that lead to horns,
but the project is compared completely inefficient to genetic engineering, she says.""The technology is great and the sky is the limit,
The US National institutes of health (NIH) occasionally supports research on transgenic pigs that model human diseases, but rarely funds proposals to produce drugs or vaccines in the milk of transgenic livestock.
An NIH spokesperson says that decisions are based on many factors, including the needs of the research community.
She was one of 56 biotechnology advocates who wrote to US President Barack Obama on 15 Â September,
And China invested nearly $800 million in transgenic pigs, cattle, sheep and crops between 2008 and 2012, says Ning Li, director of the State Key Laboratories for Agrobiotechnology in Beijing.
The Biotechnology and Biological sciences Research Council (BBSRC) supports work on GE food animals, including chickens engineered to be resistant to the bird-flu virus. A BBSRC spokesperson told Nature:"
"We consider it important to fund research that provides a range of technological options that can be applied to the challenges that we face as a society
farmers now admit that tougher biosecurity standards will be instrumental in controlling bovine TB, and conservationists concede that badgers are a major reservoir for the disease."
including microbiologist Sarkis Mazmanian, astronomer Olivier Guyon and marine ecologist Nancy Rabalais. The awards, popularly known as genius grants, come with no strings attached as to how the money is spent. see go. nature. com/ru2vgy for more.
Scientists at biotech firm Sarepta Therapeutics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which makes the drug, revealed that four boys who had taken a high dose of eteplirsen for nearly a year were able to walk an average of 21 metres farther in six minutes than at the start of the trial.
which is caused by mutations in a gene on the X chromosome and eventually leads to paralysis and death.
Animals engineered with pinpoint accuracytwo genetically engineered farm animals reported today illustrate how far from Frankenstein s stitched-together monster animal biotechnology has come.
And in pigs, scientists have used an enzyme called a TALEN2 to scramble a gene that would normally help remove cholesterol.
RNA interference (RNAI) and TALENS are more accurate at targeting the gene in question than are earlier genetic engineering techniques.
They tried replacing the gene encoding beta-lactoglobulin with a defective form, but this proved nearly impossible
because the techniques available to introduce foreign genes into animal genomes were not precise, and misplaced genes failed to express themselves correctly.
In 2006, scientists at Agresearch in Hamilton, New zealand began to experiment with molecules that interfere with the MESSENGER RNA go-between that enables translation of a gene into protein.
In mice, they discovered a short chunk of RNA, called a microrna, that targeted beta-lactoglobulin MESSENGER RNA directly to prevent its translation.
They inserted DNA encoding a version of this microrna into the genome to create genetically modified cow embryos that they hoped would grow into cows without the allergen in their milk.
says Stefan Wagner, a molecular biologist at Agresearch. That's why it has taken so long to succeed in making an allergen-free cow,
but each TALEN targets a specific DNA sequence in the genome and cuts it. As the body repairs the break
mutations are introduced often that render the targeted gene nonfunctional.""The TALEN technology is staggeringly easy, quick,
and leaves no mark in the genome, says Bruce Whitelaw, a molecular biologist at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh in the United kingdom,
His team used TALENS to disrupt genes encoding low-density lipoprotein (LDL) receptors. Without these receptor proteins to remove cholesterol-containing LDLS from the blood,
but the technique makes genetic engineering less costly and more efficient.""I d be exaggerating if
says Heiner Niemann, a bioengineer at the Institute of Farm animal Genetics in Neustadt, Germany. The excitement surrounding these technological advances is bittersweet, however.
"The current climate for animal biotech is not very good, and therefore, we are nowhere near getting this to the consumer
Breast-milk molecule raises risk of HIV transmissiona type of sugar that occurs naturally in breast milk can double the likelihood of a HIV-negative baby acquiring the virus through breast feeding
In a study in Zambia, HIV-negative newborns breastfed by HIV-positive mothers are twice as likely to catch the virus during their first month of life
clinical trials to test HMOS as health-boosting additives in infant formula milk can be drawn up.
And, potentially, those women whose milk is found to contain less favourable biochemical characteristics such as HIV-positive mothers who make lots of 3'-SL might consider giving their infants donor breast milk in place of their own.
For example, Mexico is strong in plant genetic research, so collaborations in this field could boost both industry and academia.
cio Lula da Silva, described his country s biofuel boom in March 2007. Back then, Brazil was the poster child of ethanol fuel,
Biofuels are falling from grace around the world as critics charge that devoting millions of hectares of agricultural land to fuel crops is driving up food prices
and that the climate benefits of biofuels are modest at best. But the fall has been hardest in Brazil,
leaving biofuels less competitive. On the very night that current President Dilma Rousseff gave the closing speech of the Rio+20 conference in June the final agreement
says Luiz Horta, a bioenergy researcher at the Federal University of Itajub ¡.Meanwhile, the government has tried to stimulate the economy with tax breaks on the sale of new cars.
Now, Brazil hopes to tap into a new biofuel source: second-generation ethanol, produced from the tough cellulose in plant stalks.
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 Brazilian Agricultural Research Company (EMBRAPA) is also throwing its weight behind bioenergy. Its president, Maur  cio Lopes, a geneticist who took office in October,
has promised to build up research on biomass technology and double EMBRAPA s funding for that area,
which today stands at a modest 24 million real per year.""I want to believe that the current state of the ethanol sector is a temporary blip,
Pig geneticists go the whole hogt. J. Tabasco is something of a porcine goddess at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where her ruddy,
taxidermied head looks down from the office wall of geneticist Lawrence Schook. Now she has been immortalized in this week s Nature1 not by name,
For the past couple of decades they have been slowly teasing information from the pig genome,
This week s draft sequence of T. J. s genome (see page 393 with its detailed annotation a reference genome will speed progress on both fronts,
and perhaps even allow pigs to be engineered to provide organs for transplant into human patients."
so that they could work on animals all with the same genome. One set of clones was created at the National Swine Resource and Research center (NSRRC) in Columbia, Missouri,
along with genetically engineered pigs with genes added or deleted to mimic human diseases.""Making such pigs has got increasingly easier as knowledge of the genome increases,
says physiologist Randall Prather, a co-director of the NSRRC, which is funded by the National institutes of health (NIH).
Geneticist Martien Groenen, part of the team that sequenced the pig genome, chews the fat with Thea Cunningham.
Geneticist and veterinarian Eckhard Wolf at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, Germany, has exploited the similarity between the human
One pig model carries a mutant transgene that limits the effectiveness of incretin, a hormone required for normal insulin secretion3.
Mice with the transgene developed unexpectedly severe diabetes, but the pigs have a more subtle pre-diabetic condition that better models the human disease."
This work will be enriched by the discovery, reported in the genome paper, of 112 gene variants that might be involved in human diseases.
Knowledge of the genome is also allowing scientists to try to engineer pigs that could be the source of organs,
including heart and liver, for human patients. Pig organs are roughly the right size, and researchers hope to create transgenic pigs carrying genes that deceive the immune system of recipients into not rejecting the transplants.
Back on the farm early knowledge about the pig genome led to the discovery in 1991 of a gene involved in porcine stress syndrome, in
which the stress of overheating, being moved or even having sex causes the animals to die suddenly4.
It then became possible to test for the gene and select pig stocks free of it.
Having the full genome should also help investigators to breed out susceptibility to porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS),
The PRRS Host Genetics Consortium, a network of US research groups has identified a region on one chromosome that affects levels of virus in the blood during infection5.
Archibald, who works on PRRS, says that the high-quality genome sequence should help investigators zero in on the genes responsible.
But the pig genome is not just about applications. Lead co-author Martien Groenen, a genome researcher from Wageningen University in The netherlands, has resequenced the genomes of scores of different strains of wild and domestic pigs,
and used the information to show that the pig was domesticated independently in Asia and Europe.
He has started also to work out which genes were involved in the selection of desired traits such as a longer spine to give more bacon on different continents."
"It s curiosity-driven research, but it may also help animal breeders in the future, he says
But E. rostratum is not a household name, even among mycologists. Glenn Roberts, a retired medical mycologist, says that in his 40 years of experience at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.
he had seen only one case: a soft-tissue arm wound in an immunocompromised patient. He was shocked
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.
The modus operandi of one species in this genus-E. rostratum--was to infect a plant and in some cases precipitate tissue death.
South Pacific coconut gene bank under threatthe international collection of the South Pacific's coconut palm species,
held at a field gene bank in Papua new guinea (PNG), is under threat from a disease outbreak close to the gene bank.
The deadly disease, Bogia Coconut Syndrome, is threatening the survival of a gene bank of region's most important tree
PNG was selected as the site for the gene bank in the 1990s because the country was relatively free of coconut pests and diseases.
In an attempt to contain the disease, movement of coconuts and coconut palms, both from the gene bank and for commercial reasons,
But these restrictions are preventing the gene bank from fulfilling one of its key roles:
The gene bank holds 3, 200 coconut palms, representing 57 different varieties of Cocos nucifera, and is one of five international coconut collections around the world.
Roland Bourdeix, coordinator of the International Coconut Genetic Resources Network, is arranging an urgent mission to PNG to assess the situation.
We are also planning to duplicate the gene bank in another country. The crisis is at least providing an opportunity to rethink the strategy for regional coconut conservation
For example, we are exploring a concept called'polymotu'using small islands as gene banks by planting them with one or two varieties.
some of the varieties are kept not in any other gene banks and will need to be collected again from the field.
David Hughes, an assistant professor of entomology and biology at The Pennsylvania State university, says. Every few months scientists are discovering yet another peculiar trait that,
currently comprising an estimated half of all insect biomass worldwide. One of the first clues that a tropical carpenter ant has become infected with Ophiocordyceps is that it will leave the dry tree canopy
it represents a fungal genome expressing fungal behavior through the body of an ant, the researchers noted in the paper.
The zombies'bites are synchronized near noon (possibly cued by clock genes in the fungus) and usually occur in a north-northwestern orientation.
or even hundreds, says Harry Evans, a principal scientific officer at the Center for Agricultural Bioscience International.
Hughes and Simon Elliot (of the Department of Animal Biology at the Federal University of Vicosa in Brazil) described four new species of the Ophiocordyceps fungus that were found in just a small section of rainforest in Brazil
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.
Mycologists first attributed ash dieback to Hymenoscyphus albidus, a species endemic to Europe that they thought had developed into a new, more virulent strain.
But in 2011 a group of mycologists determined that the disease was caused by a different species altogether,
"Mycologists argued back and forth, and meanwhile the pathogen moved west across Europe. The latest research indicates that H. pseudoalbidus is native to Japan,
Even if biologists can halt the spread of C. fraxinea in the United kingdom, the worldwide spread of plant pathogens shows little sign of abating in a globalized economy."
with its biomass and fullness still below pre-drought levels in 2009 when the satellite suffered a mechanical failure.
director of the Center for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington in Seattle, has built a map of elephant DNA obtained from faeces samples from across Africa.
Most biologists consider African elephants to include at least two species the savanna elephant (Loxodonta africana) and the forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis.
with biochemical proof that the strainers were used to separate dairy fats. MÃ lanie Salque, a chemist at the University of Bristol, UK, used gas chromatography and carbon-isotope ratios to analyse molecules preserved in the pores of the ancient clay
and taint the reputation of research on genetically modified crops, says Lu Baorong, an ecologist who studies the environmental safety of genetically modified crops at Fudan University in Shanghai.
Critics note that discrepancies remain over the full details of the trial. For instance, the CDC's investigation revealed that the children ate Golden Rice just once during the study
Gene-patent justice The US Supreme court said on 30 Â November that it would reexamine the question of
whether human genes are patentable. The move is the latest in a three-year legal battle between Myriad Genetics, a diagnostics company in Salt lake city
Utah, and a coalition of medical associations and physicians that has challenged the validity of the company s patents on the BRCA1
and BRCA2 gene variants linked to inherited breast and ovarian cancer. See go. nature. com/jbqdxl for more.
Scientists fear that Kenya's recent banning of the import of genetically modified organisms (GMOS) may be a significant blow to progress on biotechnology research and development in the country.
The directive comes three years after the government's establishment of the National Biosafety Authority (NBA),
Kinyua says biotechnology research in Kenya will continue as the ban does not infringe upon existing research and development activities.
She also thinks the directive could help intensify research to provide sufficient data and knowledge on biotechnology.
Richard Okoth, a biotechnology scientist at Kenyatta University, Nairobi, feels that the government's imposition of a ban
while continuing to fund research on biotechnology through the National Council for Science and Technology is a contradictory position.
Biotechnology research funding might be compromised, as international donors could be reluctant to provide funds following the ban,
But the African Biodiversity Network (ABN), a regional research network based in Kenya, supports the step taken by the government and calls for the ban's strict implementation.
Kenya only has three biosafety officers, and poor infrastructure and human capacity may make implementing the ban very challenging
the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), was thrown a lifeline on 25 january. The functions of the HFEA and another regulator the Human Tissue Authority were due to be transferred to other bodies
Biodiversity panel The Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services set up in April 2012 to assess the state of the planet s ecosystems has selected a group of 25 Â international scientists
Cox s research group at Pfizer aimed to find a way to arrange clinical-trial participants on the basis of their genetic make-up.
He was also a member of one of the teams that led the Human genome Project,
carried out research on the molecular basis of human genetic disease at Stanford university in California, and was a member of the US National Academy of Sciences.
four biennial prizes of US$1. 35 Â million each will be awarded in sustainable development, biopharmaceutical science, law and Chinese studies.
from sequencing its genome to crossbreeding coffee plants with resistant strains. Caused by the fungus Hemileia vastatrix,
The government has supported also work on the genetics of both the fungus and the plant. Research programmes have started in other countries, too.
At the Federal Rural University of Rio de janeiro in Brazil, Valdir Diola is working to isolate resistance genes in coffee
And in the United kingdom, Harry Evans is working on the genome of H. Â vastatrix at CABI in Egham.
Donald Boesch A biological oceanographer, Boesch is currently president of the Center for Environmental science at the University of Maryland in Cambridge,
in poor health in an unreported antibody production facility owned by California-based Santa cruz Biotechnology."
In 2012, Santa cruz Biotechnology ranked as the second-largest supplier in the US$1. 6-billion global market for research antibodies, according to an international survey by The Scientist and market-research firm Frost & Sullivan
and commercial animal facilities once or twice a year, inspected Santa cruz Biotechnology operations at least nine times in 2012.
Santa cruz Biotechnology declined Nature s request for an interview, but stated by e-mail that"all animals maintained at the ranch are reported annually to the  USDA,
Animal officials at the National institutes of health (NIH) would not comment specifically on the USDA findings or the use of Santa cruz Biotechnology products by NIH-supported researchers.
Poland GM ban The Polish government on 2 Â January imposed a ban on the cultivation of two genetically modified GM CROPS:
They are the only GM CROPS approved by European union (EU) science advisory committees as safe for agriculture.
The deal offered an extra year for electricity producers to claim 10 years of tax credits for wind, geothermal and biomass projects.
Lawmakers also reinstated a tax credit of US$1  per gallon (26.5  cents per  litre) for biodiesel production,
must win approvals from state and local authorities before it can upgrade its research to biosafety level 4, the highest level of containment.
and to push forward candidate drugs that include several hepatitis  C antivirals. Stem-cell transfer  Pioneering biotechnology company Geron is shedding its assets in human embryonic stem cells.
The company, based in Menlo Park, California, announced its plans on 7 Â January. It will transfer cell lines, its early clinical programme in spinal-cord injury,
The company is embroiled in intellectual-property disputes with two other firms in a prenatal genetic testing market potentially worth billions (see Nature 486
Genome reveals comb jellies'ancient originanimals evolved gradually, from the lowly sponge to the menagerie of tentacled,
This idea makes such intuitive sense that biologists are stunned now by genome-sequencing data suggesting that the sponges were preceded by complex marine predators called comb jellies.
a developmental biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle and a leading member of the team sequencing the genome of the comb jelly Pleurobrachia bachei.
in results they presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology,
Despite comb jellies'complexity, DNA sequences in the Pleurobrachia genome place them at the base of the animal tree of life, announced Swalla's colleague Leonid Moroz
Another team presented results from genome sequencing for the comb jelly Mnemiopsis leidyi, and found that the phylum lands either below,
Gene families, cell-signalling networks and patterns of gene expression in comb jellies support ancient origins as well.
For example, Moroz and his team found that comb jellies grow their nerves with unique sets of genes."
Andy Baxevanis, a comparative biologist at the US National Human genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland,
and a leader on the Mnemiopsis genome project, says that comb jellies are the only animals that lack certain genes crucial to producing microrna short RNA chains that help to regulate gene expression.
sponges and comb jellies lack other gene families that all other animals possess2, 3. If comb jellies evolved before sponges,
Alternatively, says Sally Leys, a biologist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, sponges may have complexity that scientists have yet to appreciate."
Sceptics wonder whether a high rate of genetic mutation in comb jellies might be causing the lineage to seem closer to the bottom of the tree than it really is."
which genes you use and which animals you include, says Gert WÃ rheide, a molecular palaeobiologist at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany.
Daniel Robert, a biologist at the University of Bristol, UK, knew that such electrical interactions would temporarily change the electrical status of the flowers
says Thomas Seeley, a behavioural biologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New york. Assuming we can replicate the findings,
and threatening biodiversity, says Zhang. But until his study""there was little direct evidence for the magnitude of the problem in China.
But even Monsanto, the agricultural biotechnology giant in St louis, Missouri, was surprised by the furore that followed
when it patented a method for engineering transgenic crops to produce sterile seed, forcing farmers to buy new seed for each planting.
If Bowman wins and observers say that is not out of the question the decision could make it harder for biotech firms to enforce patents on engineered organisms,
Indeed, some synthetic biology companies, concerned about policing illegal, copycat proliferation of their technology, are already working on terminator-like safeguards.
but bypassed the company by purchasing seed for a late-season crop from a grain elevator known to contain Monsanto s transgenic seed.
biotechnology firms are bracing themselves for clarifications of patents on self-replicating inventions. Without that protection, companies say,
or a cell culture or a transgenic animal and using it to generate thousands more to sell again at a fraction of the original price."
says Hans Sauer, deputy general counsel for intellectual property at the Biotechnology industry Organization, a lobby group in WASHINGTON DC.
Early patents on gene-use restriction technologies later rebranded as terminator technology by activists opposed to them described a genetic modification that switched on production of a toxin that would kill off developing plant embryos.
One tactic would be to switch off the transgene of interest in seeds, so that they could grow into new plants
Another approach is to place the transgene under the control of a switch that must be activated by a proprietary chemical.
That is the strategy of Ginkgo Bioworks, a four-year-old synthetic biology company in Boston, Massachusetts, that develops made-to-order microbes to churn out marketable chemicals.
what Kelly calls a gene-guard technology: a genetic tweak that makes production of the desired chemical dependent on a proprietary additive,
supplied by Ginkgo, in its fermentation medium. The approach could even be used in nanotechnology, by making engineered nanobots that are dependent on a proprietary raw material.
Patents owned by Monsanto required the insertion of three different genes into the plant genome.
says Brett Lund, former head of intellectual property for the biofuels group of Syngenta, an agri-giant headquartered in Basel, Switzerland."
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