Climate change threatens crunchy, tart applesthose who find satisfaction in the crunch of a hard apple have reason to be worried about climate change:
a 40-year study of Japanese apple orchards has found that global warming is producing softer but sweeter apples.
9 15 august 2013food safety concern Additives that help to colour, flavour and preserve food are deemed often officially safe by experts with financial ties to the manufacturers,
The virus is thought to have originated in bats, but could have spread to humans through one or more intermediate hosts.
all showed evidence of previous infection with MERS-Cov or a closely related virus (C.  B.  E.  M.  Reusken et  al.
H7n9 virus persists China reported on 11 august its first new case of the H7n9 avian influenza virus in three weeks:
Genetics lawsuit Ambry Genetics in Aliso Viejo, California, has countersued its competitor Myriad Genetics. Myriad, a medical diagnostics company in Salt lake city, Utah, sued Ambry in July for infringing patents that Myriad holds on tests for cancer-associated mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes.
Last week Ambry replied that Myriad s patent claims were invalid in light of a June ruling by the US Supreme court that human genes cannot be patented (see Nature 498,281-282;
2013), and countersued Myriad for suppressing competition to maintain a monopoly on the tests. Source:
) 20 august A US presidential bioethics commission discusses the ethical implications of neuroscience and its applications at a public meeting in Philadelphia,
or that hybridization between species could occur that would lower the planet's overall genetic diversity.
a conservation biologist at the University of Notre dame in Indiana who leads a working group on assisted migration."
The world s botanical gardens are concentrated in eastern North america and eastern and Central europe, with sparse or nonexistent coverage in some notable biodiversity hotspots, such as the Andes mountains
by adding an antibody to fight rotavirus originally found in llamas in the rice genome.
and found these mice had significantly less virus than mice fed normal rice. The rice could be used to complement vaccinations to protect children
but weakened immune systems are a likely factor says Miren Iturriza-Gomara, a virologist at the UK-based University of Liverpool and one of the study's authors.
but this study shows that the activity of the biosphere is increasing in spite of climate change, says Philippe Ciais, a carbon-cycle researcher at the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental sciences in Gif-sur-Yvette, France,
Chris Kuzawa, a biological anthropologist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, says that the study makes an important contribution
Genome centre On 19 september, the New york Genome Center officially opened the doors of its first dedicated research facility
Its aim is to provide nonprofit genome services and to foster collaborations between academia and industry.
says Henry Janzen, a soil biochemist at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in Lethbridge, and co-author of the chapter about agriculture in a 2007 report on climate mitigation by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."
CIAT geneticists are trying to isolate the brachialactone genes, to introduce them into crops such as wheat or rice.
Help might also come from genes that encourage faster uptake of nitrogen. Arcadia Biosciences, based in Davis,
California, has taken a gene for an enzyme called alanine amino  transferase from barley and incorporated it into other crops to encourage them to absorb nitrogen before microbes do.
On 10 september Arcadia announced that in trials by CIAT, African rice with this gene produced the same yield as controls,
using only half the fertilizer. Arcadia expects commercial partners to bring seeds to market by 2017,
The two categories refer to where patients acquire the infection as well as the bacteria s genetic lineages,
That s not too shocking, says Tara Smith, a microbiologist at Kent State university in Ohio,
Casey is at work on a follow-up genetics study to identify the most common MRSA strains in the region
A team of researchers compared the genome sequences of nearly 400 samples of diarrhoea-causing Salmonella enterica collected from people and livestock in Scotland.
the team used whole-genome sequencing to trace the tiny evolutionary steps of the collected bacterial strains.
the researchers found that bacteria from humans had more diverse collections of resistance genes than those in local livestock.
This indicates that local livestock cannot be the sole source of the resistance genes found in the strains found in humans.
he explains that it does not eliminate the possibility that resistance genes from local farms
Mark Woolhouse, an epidemiologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, says that the study clarifies how pathogens and drug-resistance genes spread."
says Daniel Karp, a conservation biologist at Stanford university in California, who led the study.""Incorporating their conservation into your management of pests is absolutely something you should do.
That idea grates with many restoration ecologists, says Hobbs. Yet studies increasingly suggest that altered ecosystems need not be bad for biodiversity or ecosystem function.
"The whole culture in wildlife biology and conservation circles has been that you can t approximate Mother Nature,
and his colleagues made use of historical records held by CABI (formerly known as the Centre for Agricultural Bioscience International),
whereas viruses and nematode worms shifted to lower latitudes. Other groups showed no detectable change."
Chris Thomas, a biologist at the University of York, UK, notes that the overall rate of movement is quite similar to that found in a meta-analysis he led on the movement of wild species1."
that those pest groups seen moving towards the equator largely nematode worms and viruses are the most poorly understood,
it must map biomass across a staggering 155 Â million hectares the largest tropical forest in a single country outside Brazil
because biomass can vary by up to 50%between patches of forest. With a map at 100-metre resolution
and height at several hundred ground plots the classic way to calculate forest biomass. The biomass estimates are used then to calibrate imagery from NASA s Landsat spacecraft and radar data from Japan s Advanced Land Observing Satellite,
to produce a measure of carbon for all 155 million hectares of jungle.""We have limited only areas where it s safe to land.
The paper, from a research group led by Gilles-Eric SÃ ralini, a molecular biologist at the University of Caen, France,
and allege that the retraction derives from the journal's editorial appointment of biologist Richard Goodman,
who previously worked for biotechnology giant Monsanto for seven years.""The magazine reviewed our paper more than any other,
who is also president of the Paris-based Committee for Research and Independent Information on Genetic engineering (CRIIGEN),
"I am paid a small honorarium for handling manuscripts about biotechnology on a part-time basis, after hours.
from viruses to fish and mammals, have become invasive in the country (see Space invaders).
said Li Bo, director of the Office for Management of Alien Species in the Ministry of Agriculture, Beijing, at the second International Congress on Biological Invasions in Qingdao last month.
and implementing biological control with natural enemies means that"there haven t been major outbreaks since 2009,
) Since its arrival,"the fungus has mutated into novel genotypes, says Sun. One of these induces trees to release large amounts of the compound 3-carene a strong attractant to the beetles that is not released in response to the north American fungal variant.
Biological invasions are"two-way traffic, she says. Most of the forest pest species in North america originally came from China
"With climate warming, increasing international trade and rapid urbanization, the problem of biological invasions will only get worse,
Samuel Wasser, director of the Center for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington, Seattle, says that poaching levels were probably higher in 2012,
and increased forensic tracing of seized ivory using genetic techniques. Q&a: Using sound to combat elephant poacherssome positive outcomes from the CITES meeting are already being seen on the ground,
who uses DNA analysis of seized tusks to try to trace the origin of illegal ivory by matching genetic variations across Africa.
Closer to the front line, George Wittemyer of Colorado State university in Fort Collins, a conservation biologist who conducts research at the Samburu National Reserve in Kenya,
and detects abnormal electrical activity in the brain, delivering corrective electrical stimulation preemptively to the brain areas in
Biofuel rules The US Environmental protection agency proposed reducing requirements for the use of biofuels on 15 Â November
The proposal would require that biofuels make up 9. 2%of the US transportation fuel supply in 2014, down from 9. 74%in 2013.
The requirement for advanced biofuels, which must reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by at least half, would drop from 1. 62%to 1. 33%.
Science educator Microbiologist Ann Reid will be the new head of the US National Center for Science Education (NCSE) in Oakland, California.
Reid, formerly director of the American Academy of Microbiology in Washington  DC, will replace retiring NCSE director Eugenie Scott,
Highlights include biodiversity, water security and bioenergy. go. nature. com/cxmbqf
Departing head of biotech institute defends GM field trialsmaurice Moloney has led Rothamsted Research in Harpenden, UK,
probably the oldest agricultural-science centre in the world, since 2010. But at the end of November he is scheduled to move to Australia to take charge of food, health and life sciences at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia.
Moloney spoke to Nature about his time in the United kingdom. I was over in Canada and
I was running a biotechnology company. Then I got an e-mail from headhunters working on behalf of Rothamsted.
when you re a plant biologist you re not going to turn down Rothamsted. The first thing to say is that as a scientist,
The other area that is outstanding is the lipid-biochemistry work of Johnathan Napier. His group has done fantastic fundamental work in plant lipid biochemistry.
One of the key outcomes has been to develop terrestrial oilseeds that produce fish oils. We ve mobilized the genes from algae that make some of these oils and put them into oilseed crops.
And sure enough we ve been able to make oils that are as good as in some cases even better than fish oils.
) Biology preprints Life scientists have a new website for sharing research papers before journal publication. The site, called biorã¡
and will include sections devoted to different subdisciplines of biology. See page 180 for more.
In Asia, pine-wood nematodes spread with the help of Japanese pine sawyer beetles (in the Monochamus genus). The worms enter the respiratory system of hatching beetle pupae in the trunks of diseased trees
Shrub genome reveals secrets of flower powera shrub with cream-coloured flowers that is the closest living descendant of Earth s first flowering plants has had its genome decoded.
The sequence of Amborella trichopoda hints at the genetic adaptations that helped flowers to emerge
Amborella is the only species in its genus, family and order.""Phylogenetically, it s really the equivalent of the duck-billed platypus and monotremes, says Claude depamphilis, a plant evolutionary biologist at Pennsylvania State university in University Park, who co-led researchers on the Amborella Genome Project.
The fruits of their labour are published in three papers in Science today1-3 . Just as the platypus genome yielded insights into the emergence of mammals,
Amborella s gives a glimpse at changes that helped flowering plants, or angiosperms, to diversify from a common ancestor with gymnosperms another major plant lineage,
Comparisons of the genomes of Amborella and those of other plants suggest that an early ancestor of flowering plants gained a duplicate copy of its genome
for instance, have between two and six copies of each chromosome. But the duplication in Amborella predates all the other polyploids,
who led a team in 2011 that inferred this ancient duplication from more limited genetic data4.
and expansion of flowering plants by providing an extra copy of each gene for evolution to play around with to yield new functions,
The origin of flowers the defining features of angiosperms might be explained by a collection of genes that appeared
analysis of the Amborella genome reveals. About one-quarter of the genes involved in flowering lack obvious counterparts in the genomes of gymnosperms,
whereas the other three-quarters existed in the common ancestor of both plant lineages. His team s analysis also provides insight into the evolution of complex seeds, floral scents and other features of flowering plants.
Keith Adams, a plant molecular geneticist at the University of British columbia in Vancouver, Canada, thinks the idea that a genome duplication helped flowering plants to diversify is"an intriguing hypothesis
Botanists studying other plants should find the Amborella genome useful as a reference point to identify
and study families of genes in other plants, including crops, he says. Depamphilis team also surveyed the genetic diversity of Amborella,
identifying four distinct populations on Grande terre. The plant may have once been distributed more extensively across New caledonia and beyond,
)" The strength of a carbon sink depends not only on current biological activity but also on former crop management practices such as fertilizer use, says Vuichard.
either by classical breeding or genetic engineering, has so far been limited. The wild Asian banana Musa acuminata malaccensis the genome of which was published last year (A. Â D Hont Nature 488,213-217;
2012) seems to be resistant, and researchers are experimenting with putting its resistance genes into the Cavendish.
The resulting transgenic specimens have been in field trials for 18 Â months on contaminated ground in Australia,
and are looking"very promising, says James  Dale, director of the Centre for Tropical Crops and Biocommodities at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia.
and this biodiversity is an important rampart against disease. Researchers do not yet have a full picture of the susceptibility of these varieties,
instead of trying to produce hardier crops through breeding or genetic modification, they are manipulating the vast array of symbiotic microorganisms that live in plants.
and plant biologist Rusty Rodriguez.""Up till now we have focused on plants as individuals, as we have with animals.
In the same way that biologists are now starting to understand the power and influence of the trillions of microbes living in and on the human body,
and introduce into a crop a single gene for a coveted trait such as salt tolerance,
researchers can use a slew of interacting genes that comes pre-integrated in a living organism,
but progress in introducing new genes through genetic manipulation has been slow. Despite decades of research, only one drought-tolerant genetically modified crop has been approved in the United states:
which expresses a stress-response gene from bacteria. Although symbiotic plant-microbe relationships such as those of the nitrogen-fixing bacteria that live in the roots of legumes have been known for many decades,
Pig virus spreads Canada confirmed its first case of porcine epidemic diarrhoea virus on 23 Â January.
The virus, which causes diarrhoea and vomiting in pigs, was detected on a farm in Middlesex County, Ontario.
First identified in the United kingdom in 1971, the virus can kill 80-100%of infected piglets.
2013), and the virus has since spread to 23 states. Fraudster punished Biotech investor David Blech is heading for prison after unsuccessfully appealing against a four-year sentence for fraud.
Blech, who helped to set up the biopharmaceutical firm Celgene in Summit, New jersey, pleaded guilty in May  2012 to manipulating the stock of two other companies.
On 21 Â January, a US appeals court upheld the prison term, as well as an order for Blech to forfeit US$1. 3 Â million.
) The species, Inia araguaiaensis (pictured), was identified through genetic testing and probably diverged from similar South american river species more than 2 Â million years ago.
) Biotech blues Biotechnology company Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) has lost its chief executive, Gary Rabin, who resigned on 22 Â January.
says Louisa Willcox, the Northern Rockies representative at the Center for Biological Diversity in Livingston, Montana.
For Christopher Servheen, a biologist who oversees grizzly-bear recovery efforts at the Fish and Wildlife Service in Missoula, Montana, that is not surprising."
But those criticisms are rejected by Frank van Manen, a wildlife biologist with the US Geological Survey in Bozeman, Montana, who led the diet study.
since 2002 that gives biologists more confidence in their population surveys. Servheen says that if the government were to decide to pursue de  listing,
dried grasses and other indigestible plant matter could greatly improve the efficiency of converting waste biomass to fuel.
Ethanol and other biofuels, including certain petrol and diesel substitutes, can be produced from simple sugars, usually by fermentation.
But most of the biomass produced in agriculture and forestry lies unused in more-complex chains of sugars, for example lignin and cellulose.
"I think there is a great potential for this approach in biomass processing, says Harvey Blanch, a bioenergy researcher at the Joint Bioenergy Institute in Emeryville, California,
who was involved not in the work. A lab-scale experiment suggests that the solvent might already produce cellulosic ethanol some 10%more cheaply than existing state-of-the-art technology,
director of biomass applications at enzyme company Novozymes, based in Raleigh-Durham, North carolina. But Luterbacher says that his team's enzyme-free process has plenty of potential for improvement."
By contrast, GVL is made easily from biomass, and easily recovered from a mixture of dissolved sugars.
and a University of Wisconsin spin-off firm, Glucan Biorenewables, is already using GVL to make furans, a different kind of biofuel.
and another company, INEOS Bio, started up a facility near Vero Beach in Florida. This year
Granbio and Fulcrum Bioenergy are all hoping to start producing cellulosic ethanol in commercial amounts in the United states
or applying extremely high temperatures to break down biomass into syngas (hydrogen and carbon monoxide). Claire Curry, a bioenergy analyst at the information firm Bloomberg New Energy Finance, expects that some 50 million to 60 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol could be produced commercially worldwide this year up from just a few
million gallons in 2013. Barriers to success are now not so much the high costs of the technology to break down cellulose as the lack of guaranteed markets for bioethanol,
adds Thomas Foust, director of the National Bioenergy Center at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado.
who studies biological-systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the new solvent deserves to be developed further."
"There is great potential for it to help overcome some of the most vexing problems associated with biofuels,
according to a new study published in Biology Letters1. The research shows that sometimes a decision like this,
says mathematical biologist Peter Trimmer of the University of Bristol, UK, a co-author of the latest study."
where high population density and poor sanitation had enabled the poliomyelitis virus to spread. Pakistan Afghanistan and Nigeria remain the only countries never to interrupt transmission of polio,
and the virus reemerged last year in war-torn Syria and the Horn of Africa. Pesticide risks On 8 Â January, the US Environmental protection agency announced the award of nearly US$500,
Maryland, had published falsified data on the immune responses of patients with hepatitis to a newly discovered virus. A week earlier, Dong-Pyou Han,
the authors suggest. 72%The increase in female speakers at the American Society for Microbiology general meeting in sessions organized by teams that included at least one woman,
regulate gene expression is the focus of a Keystone Symposium on Molecular and Cellular Biology in Taos, New mexico.
as well as other biomarkers linked to Alzheimer s disease. go. nature. com/oi5wkp
Many eyes on Earthimagine using Google earth or other online mapping tools to zoom in on high-resolution satellite images of the planet taken just hours or days ago.
Now, reproductive biologist Yukari Takeuchi from the University of Tokyo and her colleagues have identified a single molecule, known as 4-ethyloctanal,
ultraviolet and X-ray photons for experiments including semiconductor research and biological imaging since 1986. The NSF cut support in 2011 because of budget constraints (see Nature 471,278;
with biotechnology rising slightly (see chart). 4 march US President Barack Obama unveils his proposed 2015 budget.
and discuss how genome analysis can aid clinical practice and patient care. go. nature. com/dqzhpa
Vietnam on high alert over flu riskthe H7n9 avian-influenza virus that has killed more than 100 people in China in the past year has for the first time been detected in a province bordering Vietnam,
The country was hit hard by another avian-flu virus, H5n1, a decade ago, and suffered enormous economic losses and more than 60 Â human deaths.
The virus s epidemiology remains largely unchanged from last year: it is still, essentially, an avian virus that is sporadically infecting humans from a reservoir in poultry,
and there is no evidence of any continued human-to-human spread. But the virus is being sustained in unknown reservoirs in the poultry supply chain, making future outbreaks likely,
and its geographical expansion is a reminder of the threat beyond China. Furthermore, although case numbers have shown signs of dropping in the past two weeks,
One year on from the first outbreak, researchers are still struggling to understand the origins and dynamics of the virus s reservoirs and spread.
in part because the virus causes only mild disease in poultry and thus spreads silently, with human cases typically the first warning of a poultry outbreak.
and bioethics violations in 2009 (see Nature 505,468-471; 2014). ) The USPTO told Nature that it was aware of Hwang s fraudulent past
ISAAAGLOBAL planting of commercial genetically modified (GM CROPS rose 3%last year to 175 Â million hectares the smallest-ever year-on-year percentage increase.
The figures were released on 13 Â February by the nonprofit International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications. 462,000 Amount in US dollars pledged by donors to the Immunity Project,
Study revives bird origin for 1918 flu pandemicthe virus that caused the 1918 influenza pandemic probably sprang from North american domestic and wild birds, not from the mixing of human and swine viruses.
and which are crucial to figuring out the origins of gene sequences and the timing of those events, are flawed all,
says lead author Michael Worobey, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
Worobey and his colleagues analysed more than 80,000 gene sequences from flu viruses isolated from humans, birds, horses,
pigs and bats using a model they developed to map evolutionary relationships between viruses from different host species. The branched tree that resulted showed that the genes of the deadly 1918 pandemic virus are of avian origin.
A 2005 genetic analysis of the 1918 pandemic virus pulled from a victim s preserved tissue concluded that it most closely matched viruses of avian origin2.
instead that the viral genes circulated in humans and swine for at least 2 to 15 years before the pandemic and combined to make the lethal virus. Gavin Smith, an evolutionary biologist at Duke-NUS Graduate Medical school at the National University of Singapore,
calls the current study"an important contribution to how we analyse data. Smith, a co-author of the 2009 study,
notes that it identified an avian relationship for two genes in the 1918 virus, but not for six genes,
as the latest study has done. Worobey's study is highly persuasive, says Oliver Pybus, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford, UK."
"It shows the evidence for a pig origin is a lot weaker, but it s almost impossible to completely shut the door on that.
Scientists use molecular clock models of evolution to piece together relationships among organisms by tracking genetic mutations over time.
Such models rely on the notion that genetic changes accumulate at a reliable rate, like seconds ticking by.
but there is evidence that the influenza virus evolves at different rates in different hosts faster in birds than in horses, for example.
The analysis also reveals a shared ancestor for almost all avian flu strains and an H7n7 virus that struck down horses and mules throughout North america in 1872.
says Richard Lenski, an evolutionary biologist at Michigan State university in East Lansing.""We now have this idea that the source for a lot of influenza virus we see now worldwide is potentially equine,
whereas the dogma has been for so long that its avian, says Pybus.""It s a fascinating study,
is designed to speed up identification of biomarkers and promising drug targets for four diseases: Alzheimer s, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus and diabetes.
leading the US National park service to consider importing new animals for a genetic rescue. Now, nature is intervening
bringing an influx of genes (see Wolf island). But project scientists say that the opposite is more likely:
when a wolf that biologists called the old grey guy came to the island. He sired 34 Â pups
and provided a rare boost of genes that doubled the population by the mid-2000s.
John Vucetich/Rolf Petersonjohn Vucetich, co-leader of the project and an ecologist at Michigan Technological University in Houghton, says that the need for an influx of genes is becoming urgent.
Biol. Conserv. 142,1025-1031; 2009). ) For Vucetich, genetic rescue is required not so much to maintain the continuity of the study as to preserve the ecosystem.
Moose eat balsam fir trees. When the moose population expands, unchecked by predation, fewer fir seedlings can grow large enough to escape into the canopy above the reach of moose
"A genetic rescue could set a precedent for intervention in other parks. Many scientists familiar with Isle Royale support genetic rescue, especially because human activity has contributed to the current population crash.
Climate change has led to the decreasing frequency of ice bridges. Canine parvovirus, probably caught from a domestic dog,
a US Geological Survey wolf biologist based in St paul, Minnesota, argues in favour of"watchful waiting.
and that the knowledge would be useful for conservation biologists, who often need to nurture small,
and another five before federal bureaucracies approve a genetic rescue and a pack develops into a predation force.
or genetic rescue. She has initiated not a formal decision-making process, and will not commit to a timeline,
but a genetic rescue could set a precedent for interventions to counteract the effects of climate change in other parks.
Green knows that many scientists are in favour of genetic rescue, but she also hears from"wilderness-oriented advocates who urge her not to intervene."
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011