says Patrick Mcgovern, a biomolecular archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, who led the study.
After initially planning to dissolve the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority and the Human Tissue Authority,
Masayo Takahashi, a stem-cell biologist at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, plans to use sheets of retinal cells derived from ips cells to repair retinal epithelium in patients
GM CROPS dropped Agricultural biotechnology giant Monsanto has abandoned efforts to win regulatory approval for the cultivation of new genetically modified (GM CROPS in the European union (EU). The company confirmed last week
that it is withdrawing all pending EU applications for new transgenic maize (corn), soya beans and sugar beet.
Deadly pig virus slips through US bordersthe pathogen, a type of coronavirus called porcine epidemic diarrhoea virus (PEDV),
As pigs there developed immunity, the virus petered out and now causes only occasional, isolated outbreaks.
The virus can spread quickly by a faecal-oral route and infect entire herds. And although adult pigs typically recover
The virus poses no health threat to humans. The US Department of agriculture (USDA) had tried to keep PEDV and other diseases out of the country by restricting imports of pigs and pork products from certain nations, such as China.
The fact that the virus has now spread to 14 states in total is a sign that the outbreak is still flaring
and could become an epidemic (see Pig virus on the wing). SOURCE: US Department of agriculture"It s a real threat, says Lisa  Becton, a veterinary surgeon and director of swine health information at the National Pork Board, an industry group in Des Â
To understand the virus s enigmatic US entry, scientists are sequencing VIRAL DNA isolated from pigs and comparing it with PEDV variants from elsewhere in the world.
and vaccines to prevent the virus from spreading. The National Pork Board has approved $800, 000 to fund research and education.
but only after years of working with the virus. In the United states, the same import restrictions that were set up to help to prevent PEDV from entering the country have made it difficult to import the necessary lab materials for working with the virus, such as vaccines, infected cells
says Linda  Saif, a virologist at Ohio State university in Wooster. Access to the virus
and good tests in hand"would have helped us identify which herds have been exposed, and one could have imposed more stringent control measures,
The USDA s National Veterinary Services Laboratories in Ames is one of just a few US facilities to have grown the virus successfully.
the lab imported the virus around 15 Â years ago from Asia, after a lengthy security-clearance process, in preparation for just such an outbreak.
and plan to distribute the virus to researchers on request in the coming weeks. In the meantime, other research groups have focused on detecting VIRAL DNA in sick pigs
and on sequencing viral genes. In August, a team led by Douglas  Marthaler, a scientist at the University of Minnesota s Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, will publish the sequence of a virus genome taken from a Colorado farm.
They found it to be 99.4%identical to a Chinese strain of PEDV. On the basis of that sequence
many researchers suspect that the virus originated in China, but Marthaler says that he is surprised by the level of similarity,
because he would have expected the US virus to have evolved more in the time since it arrived.
the potential origin of the virus does not say anything about the route that it took to reach the United states. Canada,
And although researchers know that the virus can be transported in faeces, they do not know how long it can survive outside pigs intestines,
And researchers still hope that they can elucidate the virus s international and domestic path by looking for subtle evolutionary changes in viral genome sequences of samples from Asia and different US states.
wonders what the virus will do next. Agriculture experts speculate that it may be more stable in cooler temperatures
but little surprise at last week s announcement by the agriculture giant Monsanto that it will no longer be seeking approvals for genetically modified (GM CROPS now under review for cultivation in the European union (EU). As anti-GM campaigners celebrated,
The approval process for GM CROPS has ground to a halt in Europe despite a clear regulatory path.
But political disquiet over the cultivation of GM CROPS, including bans in some EU countries, has meant that the commission has moved not forward on any of them.
also has five GM CROPS still under review by the EFSA: four maize varieties and one sugar-beet variety.
and on enabling the import of GM CROPS for use as animal feed, a widespread EU practice that is less controversial than cultivating the crops in European fields.
is one of only two GM CROPS approved for cultivation in the EU. The other is a high-starch GM potato called Amflora that is intended for industrial applications such as paper production.
Weeds warrant urgent conservationfaced with climate change, plant breeders are increasingly turning to the genomes of the wild, weedy relatives of crops for traits such as drought tolerance and disease resistance.
But a global analysis of 455 crop wild relatives has found that 54%are underrepresented in gene bank collections
Plant breeders are interested keenly in securing the genetic diversity needed to breed new varieties that will withstand the droughts
Crop wild relatives are one of the most valuable genetic resources to improve crops, Â but they are threatened because of habitat loss as well as gene flow from domesticated plants through cross-pollination,
says Paul Gepts, a plant breeder at the University of California, Davis. The analysis identified crop species including potato, apple, aubergine,
says Susan Mccouch, a rice geneticist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New york. To prioritize species for conservation,
The team then spent two years scouring gene banks, herbaria and museums to document what is housed currently in collections
Ehsan Dulloo, head of conservation at Bioversity International, an agricultural-research organization in Rome, says that securing samples for placement in gene banks is important to protect species from destruction by natural calamities or war, for example.
thereby protecting the potential for the emergence of even more genetic diversity. One hurdle, Dulloo says,
whether the honeycomb is an example of exquisite biological engineering or blind physics. A regular geometric array of identical cells with simple polygonal cross sections can take only one of three forms:
12 18 july 2013biofuels brake Biofuels made from food crops are on course to be curbed in Europe after an 11 Â July vote by the environment committee in the European parliament.
after scientists warned that production of some biofuels drives land clearance that can lead to greater greenhouse-gas emissions than from fossil fuel (see Nature 499,13-14;
Negligence claim On 11 july, relatives of two biologists murdered in 2010 at the University of Alabama,
along with then-provost Vistasp Karbhari, sought police protection for themselves from biologist Amy Bishop, without warning or protecting others.
Myriad back in court One month after the US Supreme court invalidated gene patents held by Myriad Genetics of Salt lake city, Utah,
the company has sued two competitors for infringing different patents on tests for the cancer-related genes BRCA1 and BRCA2.
On 9 Â July, Myriad brought a lawsuit against Ambry Genetics of Aliso Viejo, California,
then filed another the following day against Gene by Gene in Houston, Texas. Both firms had announced that they would provide BRCA testing in the wake of the Supreme court ruling (see Nature 498,281-282;
Research restart Research on the rinderpest virus is set to resume after being off limits since 2011,
or intentional release of the virus. The moratorium was lifted on 10 july and replaced by an international oversight system.
biofilms and zoonotic pathogens is on the agenda at the 5th Congress of European Microbiologists in Leipzig,
since an Oregon farmer discovered unapproved transgenic wheat in a commercial wheat field, triggering bans on imports of US wheat into Japan and South korea.
But as an army of combines marches across the wheat fields of eastern Oregon, the mystery of the transgenic intruders is fresh in the minds of investigators at the US Department of agriculture (USDA),
"But if they know the genotype of those plants, they will be able to narrow it down quite a bit.
Monsanto killed the project in 2005 over farmers worries that overseas customers would not buy US wheat if it contained transgenic varieties.
Now, the USDA investigators are sifting through hundreds of markers to try to match the genetic signature of the contaminant Oregon wheat with one of the varieties from the 256 field tests registered with the USDA.
says Michael Firko, the head of biotechnology regulation at the USDA s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.
"There are folks who don t like biotechnology and who would use this as an opportunity to create problems,
Activists opposed to genetically modified crops are known best for destroying the plants rather than sowing them, but Fraley argues that those who illegally enter fields to demolish crops could also break into experimental plots to collect seed.
but it s a very small possibility, says Norman Ellstrand, a plant biologist at the University of California, Riverside.
the transgenic wheat would flower and drop most of its seeds before the rest of the crop was harvested.
She has found transgenic crops in stranger places. In 2009, for instance, she found transgenic sugar-beet seedlings in a bag of soil sold to gardeners."
"There are so many places in the system where errors can be made, she says.""Once we release these genes into the field,
we should just assume that they are going to stay in the environment
Rinderpest research restartsresearch is set to resume on the rinderpest virus, the cause of a deadly cattle disease that was declared eradicated in 2011
and has been off limits for study ever since. The moratorium part of efforts to guard against accidental or intentional release of virus that could reintroduce the disease was lifted on 10 july
and replaced by a new international oversight system for such research. In its heyday, the disease the only one other than smallpox to be eradicated from nature killed hundreds of millions of cattle, mainly in Europe, Asia and Africa
or scientific benefits and be conducted under stringent biosafety and biosecurity conditions. The first project that has garnered approval will test
whether vaccines developed against a closely related virus peste des petits ruminants (PPR), which causes disease in sheep
Some 55 labs in 35 countries still hold some kind of rinderpest virus, according to a 2011 survey published in January 2013 in the journal Emerging Infectious diseases:
The most dangerous stocks are of live field strains of virus, estimated to be kept in at least 16 labs in 14 countries,
The FAO and the OIE hope to eventually reduce the number of sites holding live wild viruses to a handful of officially designated labs
says David Ulaeto, a virologist and member of the joint advisory committee. Conversely, the agencies plan to centralize stocks of vaccines in a few high-containment repositories in regions at highest risk of disease,
The process of destroying virus or shipping it to centres with high biosafety levels must be done in a way that does not risk its release,
says Ulaeto. The FAO and the OIE are working on high-security protocols for shipping the virus
and ways to ensure that autoclaves in labs holding it are certified to function at levels guaranteed to provide a 100%kill.
EU debates U-turn on biofuels policythe European union (EU) has spent the past 10 years nurturing a  15-billion (US$20-billion) industry that makes transport fuel from food crops such as soya beans
Now the EU could change course by setting a cap on the use of food-based biofuel,
Tensions are rising over how much of the emerging science on biofuel emissions will be included in EU policy ahead of a vote on 10 Â July by the key European parliament committee dealing with the legislation.
Europe began mandating the development and use of biofuels in 2003. The two latest laws on the subject, passed in 2009,
Biofuel counts towards that requirement if it produces a 35%emissions saving over fossil fuels, or 50%from 2017 onwards;
helping to generate a thriving bio  fuels industry based mainly on biodiesel. Europe is even importing rapeseed and vegetable oil to meet demand.
But the original accounting for biofuel emissions was all wrong, as Tim Searchinger, who studies environmental economics at Princeton university in New jersey, noted in an influential 2008 article (T.  Searchinger et  al.
when agricultural land is used to plant biofuel crops, fresh land may be ploughed up to accommodate the existing crops that have been edged out.
most varieties of biodiesel turn out to produce more emissions than bioethanol and often more than fossil fuels.
ethanol from maize (corn) the main biofuel for US vehicles was given the green light under the agency s rules.
But the European commission has ducked the issue in the face of strong resistance from the biofuels industry and Europe s energy and agricultural sectors.
Under the proposal, land-use figures would not be used to select one biofuel over another. But fuel suppliers would have to start including land-use figures produced by the IFPRI
the committee proposed gradually increasing mandates for use of advanced biofuels not made from food crops."
But Europe s Joint Research Centre in Brussels says that the models used to calculate the land-use numbers are no less certain than the accepted science on the direct emissions of biofuels
and is pushing to incorporate land-use change numbers to distinguish between better and worse food-crop biofuels.
whereas others, including central and eastern European countries with strong biofuel lobbies, do not. Although this month s vote will lay out the main lines of argument,
A vaccine that protects piglets from one common influenza virus also makes them more vulnerable to a rarer flu strain,
The animals responded by making antibodies that blocked that virus but aided infection with the swine flu H1n1,
The root of the different immune responses lies with the mushroom-shaped haemagglutinin protein found on the outside of influenza-virus particles
In the study, a vaccine for H1n2 spurred pigs to produce antibodies that bound the cap and the stem of that virus s haemagglutinin.
helping that virus fuse to cell membranes. That made H1n1 more efficient at infecting pigs and causing disease.
because they are relatively consistent across many types of influenza viruses. The new study suggests that such vaccines could also produce antibodies that enhance the ability of some viruses to infect new hosts,
says James Crowe, an immunologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. But that does not mean that researchers should stop developing novel flu vaccines,
Gary Nabel, a flu-vaccine researcher and chief scientific officer at the biotechnology firm Sanofi in Cambridge, Massachusetts, agrees."
Lead author Hana Golding, a microbiologist at the US Food and Drug Administration in Bethesda, Maryland, agrees
Emergence of H7n9 avian flu hints at broader threatthe H7n9 influenza virus did not emerge alone.
the authors of a study published today in Nature1 say that their finding reinforces the idea that H7 avian viruses are constantly mixing
and exchanging genetic material a process known as reassortment in Asian poultry markets. This raises the threat that H7n7 will reassort
Ducks, in particular, act as living mixing bowls for avian viruses. Domestic species encounter a large catalogue of wild-bird viruses,
which swap genes to form versions that can spread to chickens and to humans. Better surveillance of Chinese bird populations is needed to monitor the emergence of dangerous viruses such as H7n9,
says lead author Yi Guan, an influenza specialist at the University of Hong kong. In China, the virus has infected 135 people
and resulted in 44 deaths since February. This is a very different influenza ecosystem from other countries
says Guan. Guan's team sampled wild birds and poultry markets around Shanghai in April,
About 10%of samples tested positive for an influenza virus; of those, 15%were an H7 virus
. When the team sequenced the two viruses genomes and compared them to other bird-flu strains,
they found H7n9 and H7n7 to be hybrids of wild Eurasian waterfowl strains, such as H7n3 and H11n9.
The scientists think that those viruses swapped genes in domestic ducks before spreading to chickens, where they traded genes with a common chicken virus, H9n2.
That improved the viruses'ability to spread in chickens, which live in close contact with humans.
But Guan and his team found that ferrets could become infected with the virus suggesting that a spread to humans is possible.
It really shows that the emergence of these types of viruses can happen at any time,
David Morens, an influenza researcher and senior adviser at the US National institutes of health in Bethesda, Maryland, says that the evolutionary pathway that the viruses followed suggests that more surveillance
A gene with a role in horn growth explains his fertility and his longevity, finds a study of sheep on a remote Scottish isle.
the genes underlying the trait should have become ubiquitous, says Susan Johnston, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK,
who led the research. Yet some male sheep have short horns or none at all.""From an evolutionary perspective, it doesn t really make sense,
Two years ago, Johnston s group reported that a single gene, RXFP2, explains horn variability in the sheep (S. Â E. Â Johnston et al.
) One version of the gene, Ho+,is linked to large horns; another allele, Hop, is associated with small ones.
In the latest study, published in Nature, Johnston s team related the RXFP2 genes of 1, 750 sheep to three factors:
horn size, reproductive success and lifespan (S.  E. Johnston et  al. Nature http://dx. doi. org/10.1038/nature12489;
) Males with one or two copies of the Ho+allele had the biggest horns. They fathered twice as many lambs as those with two copies of the short-horned allele,
averaging 3 (versus 1. 6) each year, says Johnston. But where lifespan was concerned, rams with two copies of Hop had an edge,
compared with a 61%chance for those with two long-horned alleles. The scientists found that rams with one version of each allele (heterozygotes) had the best of everything:
they were horned big, fecund and long-lived. And this explains why short-horned rams persist.""I m just impressed by the simple elegance of this story,
says Hopi Hoekstra, an evolutionary geneticist at Harvard university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Johnston says that to learn more,
scientists will need to study the gene: in humans and mice, it is involved in sexual development and bone density.
In 1999, they finally produced a tasty variety that contained the Vf defence gene, bred in from an unappetizing relative.
Even armed with modern breeding techniques and 15 Â known defence genes in the apple family
but growing pool of academics and companies hoping to taking advantage of the latest approaches in genetic engineering,
Schouten argues that his product should not be regulated in the same way as genetically modified (GM CROPS that are engineered with bacterial or VIRAL DNA.
that have so far been ignored by biotechnology giants.""There are any number of companies exploring new techniques to produce crops that don t trigger regulatory oversight,
The regulation of GM CROPS in the United states is based on laws that were not tailor-made for the technology.
The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), the branch of the agriculture department responsible for overseeing GM CROPS,
has stuck so far to a strict interpretation of a 1957 law designed to protect agriculture against plant pests that was coopted in 1986 to regulate GM CROPS.
At that time, GM CROPS were engineered nearly always using Agrobacterium tumefaciens a bacterial pest that can insert DNA into plant genomes.
In 2011, APHIS regulators announced that a herbicide-tolerant Kentucky bluegrass would not fall under their purview,
instead used a gene gun to fire DNA-coated gold particles into plant cells. Some of that DNA is incorporated then into the genome.
For Greg Jaffe, director of biotechnology at the Center for Science in the Public interest a consumer advocacy group in Washington  DC, the news highlighted the shortcomings of the US regulatory system for GM  crops."
"The whole system is a fiction, he says. And some are starting to test the regulation-free waters.
Dennis Gray, a developmental biologist at the University of Florida in Apopka is trying to use genes from grape varieties to engineer a wine grape that is resistant to Pierce s disease a condition caused by a bacterium that has made it difficult to grow wine grapes in the state.
He says that the lack of regulation is encouraging researchers like him to pursue such small-market crops."
Sally  Mackenzie, a plant biologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, contacted APHIS about the high-yield offspring of a transgenic sorghum grass plant
even though these offspring no longer contain the engineered gene. Mackenzie thinks that the transgene triggered an epigenetic change:
it altered the plant s gene expression by changing the pattern of chemical groups added to its DNA rather than changing the DNA sequence itself.
In 2012, APHIS regulators invited Mackenzie to the organization s headquarters in Riverdale, Maryland, and questioned her about this hypothesis. APHIS eventually notified her that it would not regulate her plants a decision that Mackenzie says has accelerated her research
such as zinc-finger nucleases enzymes that precisely target a region of the plant genome. In 2010, APHIS told Dow Agrosciences of Indianapolis, Indiana,
Jennifer Kuzma, a policy analyst at North carolina State university in Raleigh, says that a lack of regulation for the latest approaches could fuel public suspicions about GM CROPS."
"The flip side is that they are so powerful you can engineer multiple genes at one time.
He notes that Agrobacterium inserts genes more efficiently than the gene-gun method. Although zinc-fingers are appealing for their specificity
in spite of the fact that the genes he introduced came from other apples. This was used because he Agrobacterium to insert the genes it did not matter to regulators that no trace of Agrobacterium DNA remained in his plants.
Schouten is perplexed. If he had used a gene gun, he would have inserted DNA haphazardly and in a manner more likely to damage other sites in the genome yet this remains the unregulated method."
"To me, this is a very strange system, he says
Genetically modified crops pass benefits to weedsa genetic-modification technique used widely to make crops herbicide resistant has been shown to confer advantages on a weedy form of rice, even in the absence of the herbicide.
The finding suggests that the effects of such modification have the potential to extend beyond farms and into the wild.
Several types of crops have been modified genetically to be resistant to glyphosate, an herbicide first marketed under the trade name Roundup.
The genetic-modification technique used, for instance, in the Roundup Ready crops made by the biotechnology giant Monsanto,
Missouri typically involves inserting genes into a crop s genome to boost EPSP-synthase production.
The genes are derived usually from bacteria that infect plants. The extra EPSP synthase lets the plant withstand the effects of glyphosate.
Biotechnology labs have attempted also to use genes from plants rather than bacteria to boost EPSP-synthase production
in part to exploit a loophole in US law that facilitates regulatory approval of organisms carrying transgenes not derived from bacterial pests.
whether transgenes such as those that confer glyphosate resistance can once they get into weedy or wild relatives through cross-pollination make those plants more competitive in survival and reproduction."
"The traditional expectation is that any sort of transgene will confer disadvantage in the wild in the absence of selection pressure,
says Norman Ellstrand, a plant geneticist at the University of California in Riverside. Â Â But now a study led by Lu Baorong, an ecologist at Fudan University in Shanghai, challenges that view:
creating second-generation hybrids that were genetically identical to one another except in the number of copies of the gene encoding EPSP synthase.
The researchers also found that the transgenic hybrids had higher rates of photosynthesis, grew more shoots and flowers and produced 48-125%more seeds per plant than non-transgenic hybrids in the absence of glyphosate.
Making weedy rice more competitive could exacerbate the problems it causes for farmers around the world
"If the EPSP-synthase gene gets into the wild rice species, their genetic diversity, which is really important to conserve,
because the genotype with the transgene would outcompete the normal species, says Brian Ford-Lloyd, a plant geneticist at the University of Birmingham, UK."
"This is one of the most clear examples of extremely plausible damaging effects of GM CROPS on the environment.
 The study also challenges the public perception that genetically modified crops carrying extra copies of their own genes are safer than those containing genes from microorganisms."
"Our study shows that this is not necessarily the case, says Lu. The finding calls for a rethinking of future regulation of genetically modified crops,
some researchers say.""Some people are now saying that biosafety regulation can be relaxed because we have a high level of comfort with two decades of genetic engineering,
says Ellstrand.""But the study shows that novel products still need careful evaluation
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