For foster parents, there are huge costs involved with no promise of passing on genes. Scientists have long been interested in adoption,
Biologist George C Williams called this phenomenon misplaced reproductive function Â. One other common form of adoption occurred
In one breeding season, biologists from Spain's Universidad de Cordoba found nest switching in 40%of broods across three distinct white-stork breeding colonies.
Biologist Kevin Brown of York University thinks that the costs of better chick discrimination could be even higher.
we are seeing new purposes for urban landscaping that are transforming the 20th century woodland park into bioswales oe plantings designed to filter stormwater oe green roofs, wildlife corridors,
followed by interviews and questionnaires about biodiversity with individual households. Â These studies are helping both researchers
and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), says that using food for energy oe like sugar cane for biofuels oe must avoid depleting food stocks
In his book How the Mind Works, US psychologist Steven Pinker writes that disgust may reflect an intuitive understanding of microbiology.
These cities of the sea could use algal biofuel production and store energy from wind and the Sun. As designs improve oe
and there are potentially a range of different genetic mechanisms to choose from. Many of the proteins used in the C4 pathway are taken from C3 plants
because it is a genetically simple plant oe with two sets of chromosomes like us oe unlike,
and switching the biochemical make-up of enzymes and proteins to the C4 type. Corn offers a good model
So geneticists are painstakingly comparing the genetic code of the two leaf types to find out what makes a C4 leaf a C4 leaf.
She is looking for the crucial C4 players by over-expressing candidate genes in rice,
or by knocking out the gene in millet, to see what happens. If they do find the genetic code for C4,
and it works in rice, Langdale says it will be fairly simple to convert other crops, such as wheat, barley and rapeseed (canola).
Will we continue on a path of global climate change, land-use change, resource depletion, biodiversity loss and population expansion?
If a virus can infect someone in one part of the world it is unlikely to be contained.
A new strain of influenza virus occurs every 1-2 years, for example. But the sudden global explosion of an epidemic that infects a large number of the population oe a pandemic oe is harder to predict.
, due to the virus's effects. So what would be the result of a global pandemic in the 21st Century?
Biodiversity would recover in many cases, due to reduced human encroachment on habitats hunting and pollution.
That means losing some 1. 2 million square kilometres of other landscapes to urban construction alone, many of them rich in biodiversity.
But what is certain is that the survivors of these menagerie experiments in the human garden will produce a genetic legacy.
The practice of biomimicry already taps into nature's ingenuity oe for example, the famous hexagonal skin of Norman Foster's Gherkin was inspired by the Venus Flower Basket sponge,
biotechnology has revealed that multicellular organisms can perform similar processes oe but even more powerfully. Although these creatures cannot be seen with the naked eye,
For example, Alberto Estevez's Genetic Barcelona proposes using synthetic biology techniques -which enables us to grow organisms that do not exist in nature by manipulating their DNA oe to create trees that produce a natural light-producing protein usually found in jellyfish.
improve water quality and increase biodiversity. Â These developments in living technology suggest that we will evolve solutions using the transformational properties of natural systems.
Importantly, since biology is everywhere, these approaches are confined not to Western societies. Increasingly DIY bio communities are learning how to hack natural systems
and diversify living technology applications. This may streamline global human development with such natural processes so that our lifestyles are more sustainable,
Laurie Garrett Foreign policy 24 april 2013 Ten years after Sars, a new virus strikes China, perhaps more deadly,
 Where uniqueness lies Gary Marcus Nautilus 29 april 2013 Advances in genetics, biology, neuroscience, anthropology, tend to point up how similar humans are to other animals, not how different.
However in 2009, the Food and Drug Administration defined helminths as biological products that could not be sold before having undergone a series of clinical trials
Coronado Biosciences, a Massachusetts-based company, hopes to have results from two large studies being carried out in the US into the use of pig whipworm eggs to treat Crohn's disease by the end of the year.
bona fide treatments based on the biology of the worms that can be scaled up and manufactured without the complexities
So far, so good oe we have a biological explanation for why cranberry juice might prevent infections,
reducing the region's scale and biodiversity. But this felling also has an impact on the planet as a whole
The function and purpose of dung-showering is still only partially understood, according to biologist Richard Despard Estes.
Stanford biologist Douglas J Mccauley and colleagues carefully described the mating habits of this toothy species in 2010.
genes or the quantum states of atoms oe is linked closely to the field of thermodynamics, which was devised originally to understand how heat flows in engines and other machinery.
Today, I flew the world's first 100%biofuel flight, said pilot Tim Leslie on landing the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) craft.
However, it could equally have been powered by one of a number of biofuels made from algae, flax, coconut husks or even from used cooking-oil.
In the short term biofuels are looked on as a potential savior as most commercial passenger jets can use them with little to no modification,
and the data collected enables us to better understand the impact of biofuel on the environment,
which partnered with a number of firms oe including biofuel suppliers-for the trial. The NRC test is the latest in a series of demonstration flights aimed at proving the worth of biofuels.
 In 2008, Virgin Atlantic was the first to fly a plane on a blend of biofuel and regular jet fuel.
Since then, the number of trials has increased year on year withat least 15  airlines and several aircraft manufacturers performing flight tests with various blends  containing up to 50%biofuel.
And, in 2011, KLM became the first airline to test it in regular commercial flights between Amsterdam
and Paris. All of these tests oe including Transatlantic flights-have shown that biofuel  works well,
One of his main criticisms is that in some cases biofuels can lead to deforestation and a large increase in greenhouse gas emissions.
showed that emissions from burning biofuels varied hugely depending on the type of land used to grow the fuel-crops.
For example, biofuels made with palm oil from a plantation made by clearing rainforest emitted 55 times more carbon dioxide (over its life cycle) than oil from a previously cleared area.
"The situation is more complex than just looking to biofuels, Â says Prof Barrett.""There are many types of biofuel,
there are many different kinds of biomass which can be used to create biofuel, and there are many different ways of taking that biomass and converting it,
and all of those things have different properties in terms of how much they cost and how efficient they are.
We need to get more sophisticated about determining which ones make environmental sense. Â Other big challenges for biofuels include
whether land used for growing the necessary crops is taking land away from growing food,
and also just the sheer size of the land area that would be needed to cultivate enough biomass to feed the growing aviation industry.
As a result scientists increasingly advocate the use of crops that grow in areas that would not normally support agriculture oe such as salicornia, a salt loving plant oe or the use of algae,
"We are convinced that sustainable biofuels can provide a way to reduce the CO2 by between 60 and 80%on an airplane,
Â"We really do believe that by 2030,30%of all airplane fuel could be provided by sustainable biofuels.
Barnosky studies biodiversity changes and extinction rates that occurred in the deep past, and compares them to trends happening now.
or Age of man, will be marked by a rapid decline in biodiversity as animals and plants disappear from the planet forever.
enabling the separated biodiversity to mix for the first time. This happened when the North and South american continents collided into each other, around 3 million years ago, for example.
But many of these areas are protected in name only oe the parts of the world with the greatest biodiversity are often in the poorest and most troubled regions
It is fairly certain that the Anthropocene will be a time of much poorer biodiversity. Once-common species will be extinct,
and others, discussing our impacts on the planet's biodiversity and geology, in a four-part series called The Age We Made,
This requires intimate knowledge of the bed bug's basic biology. But, because bed bugs were at such low levels for decades,
Today, roughly 90%of bed bugs have a genetic mutation that makes them resistant to pyrethroids,
Biological tactics are emerging as another possible option. Insect growth regulators, or IGRS, are chemicals that prevent bed bugs from completing their lifecycle,
The professor of genetics at Barnard College sent his students out to trawl the markets'open-air displays of exotic fish, fruit and vegetables,
Scientists and authorities think they can finally put an end to this unscrupulous trading by using a technique that can identify species from its genetic material like a barcode on a cereal box.
Towards the back of the fish popsicle, Birck had cut a small square for sequencing a little bit of DNA called the CO1 gene oe also known as the"barcode of life Â. Normally Birck
copies the gene they're looking for and sequences it. They then compare the sequence they have with a database of animals and plants.
and analyse a small snippet of a gene that differs slightly but in a detectable way from species to species. The idea isn't terribly new:
the decision to use the CO1 gene as the"barcode  was made around 2003, mainly due to work by Paul Herbert at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada.
Herbert's group proposed that the CO1 gene could work as a barcode for several reasons:
as the gene is found outside the cell nucleus in structures called mitochondria. Herbert's team also showed that screening the gene can distinguish closely related species with 98%accuracy.
For them, it made sense to pick a small region to sequence, rather than spending considerably more time analysing the whole genome."
"Whenever one has a job to do, one is always looking for the simplest way to do it,
While the CO1 gene works most of the time, there are still species immune to barcoding.
Sturgeons, for example, simply can't be barcoded using the CO1 gene oe the gene hasn't evolved enough between different species oe so identifying their caviar through barcoding is impossible.
scientists don't use the CO1 gene at all; instead two little regions of DNA are used as"barcodes Â,
what different species'CO1 genes look like is kept. Right now, there are 112,547 animal species in the database,
Herbert and his group have enlisted biologists all over the world to incorporate barcoding into their fieldwork to keep the database growing.
and some products, there are certain processes that destroy most traces of genetic material.""A Slim-Jim is fine,
 Then, in 2008, they got talking to a biologist colleague at the University of Central Florida where they worked.
 says Bryan Sykes, a professor of human genetics at the University of Oxford in the UK.
"Scientists seek big genes of bigfoot Â, read one. But the professor says that the response was to be expected.
It is a technique that is widely used in biology. For example it is used by food inspectors to check
whilst field biologists use it to identify organisms. In all cases the technique is largely the same.
"Up until the last couple of years, you needed quite a lot of biological material  and often the results were said inconclusive,
because the keratin oe a kind of biological plastic that encases the hair shaft-Â protects the DNA that it contains from the contamination
 says Dr Murray Cox from the Institute of Molecular Biosciences, Massey University in  New zealand."
Darren Curnoe of the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental sciences at the University of New south wales in Australia, the chances of finding a completely new species of hominid are remote.
and use a fraction of the biogas to run the milk chiller. The rest could be used for cooking or lighting.
the slurry that comes out of the biogas can be used to fertilize grass and crops, he says.
Kisaalita found that farmers were convinced not that converting the biogas was worth the money. As an alternative, he developed a milk chiller that runs on propane,
now build me a biogas version, and wean me off of propane.''He now has a pilot up
have caused biodiversity changes in which more than 90%of the weight of all terrestrial vertebrates is made now up of humans
By 2050, it is estimated that we could triple our resource consumption to a whopping 140 billion tonnes of minerals, ores, fossil fuels and biomass per year.
much of our biodiversity has been lost irrevocably, and we're still pumping out greenhouse gases. Others point out that there is more than enough environmental space on this planet for everyone to live sustainably,
We're polluting the biosphere, acidifying the oceans, and reducing biodiversity. At the same time, our global population will grow from seven billion to nine billion by 2050,
and all will need food, water and clean air. As if to illustrate the point further, last month Arctic monitors showed the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has passed 400 parts per million (before the Industrial Age,
and in this way reduce our species'influence back to being just another part of the biosphere, rather than its driving force.
or"biodiversity loss Â. Others contest that there are either no biophysical thresholds for these, or that we are far from reaching them.
adding that we already have for three of the nine (climate change, nitrogen cycle and biodiversity loss).
Building the protein components needed for life involves a complex set of machinery in our cells translating information encoded in our genes into a sequence of amino acids,
Another online program, Phylo, is advancing scientists'knowledge of genetics by making a game out of DNA matching.
If areas of genetic sequence are roughly similar between species, it suggests strongly that they could have an important function.
and other biologists fear may be the sixth mass extinction in the Earth's 4. 5 billion-year history,
we are inevitably losing different species. Saving biodiversity would cost $300 billion a year, according to the chief of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity.
Megafaunal biomass (that's anything weighing more than 97lbs, or 44kg) is greater now than at any time
and conserve local biodiversity by, for example, helping keep the herbivore numbers down, which allows tree saplings to mature.
and one that may be helped by findings that captive tigers in China actually retain broad genetic diversity now lost in their fewer wild relatives,
And this genetic wealth also allows for the option of cloning tigers should we be reduced to the last few.
 says Harvard Medical school geneticist George Church. And then European settlers arrived. Mass hunting and habitat loss rapidly reduced their numbers until on 1 september 1914, Martha,
 Armed with new reproductive biology and genome engineering technologies, he and other scientists are dreaming up ambitious plans to resurrect long-dead animals from pigeons to Tasmanian tigers and wooly mammoths.
 The same technologies could also prevent endangered species from going the way of the dodo oe or the passenger pigeon.
In 1972, Oliver Ryder, a geneticist at the San diego Zoo, had the visionary idea of freezing skin samples from endangered animals in the hope they might help protect these species in the future.
Many captive animals suffer from genetic abnormalities and inbreeding, and Ryder imagined that his repository of animal cells could be used long after their donors died to help zoo veterinarians manage captive populations.
Scientists at the American biotechnology company Advanced Cell Technologies who had helped pioneer cloning in cattle,
 says William Holt, a reproductive biologist at the Zoological Society of London, who in a 2004 review paper called the prospect of cloning highly endangered species"hopelessly optimistic Â. Reverse switch But another scientific breakthrough,
With extinct animals, scientists need to take more involved measures to recover the complete DNA sequence oe its genome.
Armed with this code, they then need to find a way of engineering a regular pigeon's stem cells into behaving like a passenger pigeon's stem cells by mutating the genome.
Church says the complete genome of the passenger pigeon from museum specimens will soon be published and researchers are beginning to alter the genetic make-up of a more familiar bird oe the chicken oe to practice their techniques."
"What you can do for chicken you should be able to do for pigeon, and that can include creating DNA that you haven't seen alive for a 100 years,
But even if Church has the passenger pigeon's full genetic code, which he expects to recreate within a decade,
Church admits that bringing it back to life requires a significant improvement in existing genome engineering technologies.
To endow ordinary lab mice with these traits Church will try to partially rewrite the genomes of mouse stem cells.
Hendrik Poinar, a palaeo-geneticist at Mcmaster University in Hamilton, Canada, and his team have uncovered similarly well-preserved mammoth bones and never found viable cells or nuclei."
 Poinar says that genome engineering offers a more realistic shot at resurrecting woolly mammoths and other long-extinct species. Ten thousand-year-old cells and their nuclei may be degraded too to be used in cloning,
but they still contain the animal's genetic code. This genome is shredded into short fragments,
but DNA sequencing machines can read these shards and powerful computers can stitch them into a genome sequence.
Scientists published a 80%complete version of the mammoth genome in 2008 and more ancient animal genomes are on the way,
such as the Tasmanian tiger. These genomes exist in the form of computerised data, but they could serve as a blueprint for altering the DNA of a cell from a closely related species. For instance,
the code of a woolly mammoth's genome differs from an African elephant's by roughly 240,000 DNA letters out of a total of 4 billion,
though most of these changes are not likely to have a biological effect. An elephant ips cell engineered to contain those mutations would theoretically be capable of producing woolly mammoth sperm.
Better yet the woolly mammoth stem cells could be implanted besides an elephant embryo early in development,
producing a chimera animal with some tissues made from elephant cells and others from mammoths.
or indeed any extinct species would require a dizzying list of technological leaps in genome engineering, reproductive biology,
Basic genetic principles may carry over to more exotic animals but many steps will not, particularly those involving reproduction and development.
 Ewen Callaway writes about biology and medicine for Nature Newsif you would like to comment on this story
At the Tropical Soil Biology and Fertility Institute in Nairobi I met soil scientist Peter Okoth,
And when you factor in climate change, limited fresh water supplies and competition for harvests from biofuel makers, it is clear the world faces a major challenge.
the machinery sowing this new revolution includes supercomputers, molecular biology and arrays of sensors. Here, BBC Future profiles four areas of research to discover how close they are to feeding the coming nine billion.
so the team set about looking for the genetic switches that could mimic the action and ramp up the plant's ability to harness the sun. That is easier said than done.
However, this is not the only way of increasing photosynthesis. Scientists are also exploring the idea that genes from the ancestors of modern-day plants might boost the ability of crops to harness the sun. It is well known that primitive plants known as cyanobacteria have a talent
they achieved a 20%increase in tobacco plants after adding a single cyanobacteria gene called inorganic carbon transporter B (Ictb.
and colleagues from the University of Nebraska have carried out some initial tests on soybeans transformed with the same gene,
There is huge opposition to genetically modified crops in many countries, with some groups citing safety concerns and others ethical, arguing that the developing world should not be used as a laboratory to test such crops.
"The cost of meeting global regulatory requirements for a single gene engineered into a crop can run into many millions,
Using genetic techniques unavailable to Borlaug, they then crossed this flood-tolerant strain with a high-yield strain of rice."
which has been engineered with genes from daffodils and bacteria to produce beta-carotene, a nutrient that the body can convert into Vitamin a.
But rather than importing genes from another organism researchers are now trying to find maize strains that naturally produce high levels of beta-carotene.
They then looked for any genes in these maize strains that resembled genes linked to high beta-carotene levels in other plants."
which carry a gene variant that slows down the conversion of beta-carotene to other substances,
As important, they also found a genetic marker that signals when this sought-after gene variant is in place.
Plant breeders are using the naturally occurring maize plants and those markers to breed new plants.
In 2011 more corn went to biofuel than to feed for the first time in the US. Another big pressure is climate change.
ecology and biology have been transformed by humans. Human scientists say Earth has entered the Anthropocene epoch oe the Age of man oe
and the animals we have domesticated, according to Prof Vaclav Smil in his book The Earth's Biosphere:
which are genetic twins to humans, having a 97.5%similarity with human brain cells. The injection was marginal (a mere 0. 1%increase) but in the future,
and injecting parts of one half into the other just to see what would happen. http://ts-si. org/biology/3305-brain-before-body-the-spemann-mangold-experiments 12.
and would establish a body charged with scientifically investigating the dangers and merits of genetically modified crops.
oeover a million people across Europe have set the EU a democratic test will the EU address the real concern people have about GM CROPS and food,
The city of Alphen aan den Rijn ordered the study five years ago after officials found unexplained abnormalities on trees that couldnt be ascribed to a virus or bacterial infection.
This revelation was arrived at over a period of 15 years by teams of researchers from seemingly disparate fields who have used classical genetic studies to unravel the mysteries of disease resistance in plants and animals
and Bruce Beutler, an immunologist and mammalian geneticist at The Scripps Research Institute, describes how researchers have used common approaches to tease apart the secrets of immunity in species ranging from fruit flies to rice.
who was a co-recipient of the 2008 U s. Department of agricultures National Research Initiative Discovery Award for work on the genetic basis of flood tolerance in rice. oesome of the resistance mechanisms that researchers will discover will likely serve as new
In 1995, Ronald identified the first such receptor a rice gene known as known as Xa21 and in 1998
Beutler identified the gene for the first immune receptor in mammals a mouse gene known as TLR4.
The researchers note that plant biologists led the way in discovering receptors that sense and respond to infection.
The 1980s brought about an intense hunt for the genes that control production of the receptor proteins, followed by an oeavalanche of newly discovered receptor genes and mechanisms in the 1990s.
It is likely that the gene transfer was mediated by a parasite or a pathogen. The debate over genetically modified organisms (GMOS) is heated.
One of the arguments against them is that it is unnatural to mix genes from different species. However, research in Lund, Sweden,
shows that genetic modification can take place naturally among wild plants. oein our research group we have suspected this for some time,
The research group on evolutionary genetics has discovered that a gene for the enzyme PGIC has been transferred into sheeps fescue (Festuca ovina) from a meadow grass, probably Poa palustris,
a reproductively distinct species. The DNA analyses also show that only a small part of a chromosome was transferred.
This is the first proven case of the horizontal transfer of a gene with known function from the nucleus of one higher plant to another. oeunfortunately
we dont know exactly how the gene jump between the species occurred, which is not surprising as it took place perhaps 700,000 years ago.
The most plausible explanation is that the gene was transmitted by a parasite or pathogen, such as a virus, perhaps with the help of a sap-sucking insect, says Professor Bengtsson.
If gene jumps can occur naturally between plants belonging to different species, does this mean that there is no longer any reason to oppose genetically modified crops?
According to Bengt O. Bengtsson, the answer is far from simple. He notes that the new results are interesting and important,
but they do not say much about what is right or wrong in society. oemany fear genetically modified crops because they believe that they may lead to unwanted gene spread in nature.
This argument does not impress me. I sympathise, however, with the unease over the increased use of patents and monopolising practices in plant breeding.
and commercially independent research on plant genetics can be carried out in universities, says Bengt O. Bengtsson. more via sciencedaily Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati h
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