fish and plants won't be able to survive, and the river will die. How can we change the way we use
and eventually the entire plant wilts and rots. The disease was originally found in Ethiopia,
The sweet pepper gene produces a protein called HRAP that strengthens the plant's ability to seal off infected cells.
These plants will grow side by side with another GM banana variety developed at the laboratory, which has been fortified with Vitamin a
In another part of Tel Megiddo, Weiner points out a layer rich in a form of silica (Sio2) that accreted in and around the cells of plants.
Because the dung of grazing animals would be expected to contain a high proportion of wild plants,
Plants flowering later on the Tibetan Plateau: Nature Newsin many regions, climate change has advanced the timing of spring events, such as flowering or the unfolding of leaves.
But the meadows and steppes of the Tibetan Plateau are bucking that trend plants are starting to bloom later in spring,
Xu says he expected that plants on the plateau would follow the same pattern of early flowering seen elsewhere.
The net effect was a shortening of the growing season by about one month for steppe plants and three weeks for meadow vegetation.
Plants that have evolved in cold-weather climates become dormant in the winter to avoid frost damage.
because plants are not meeting their chilling requirements a minimum period of time that plants must experience cold before they break winter dormancy.
Martin Lechowicz, a plant ecologist at Mcgill University in Montreal Quebec is not surprised, however. Lechowicz and his colleagues have analysed
Many models of climate change's effects on the growing season don't deal with the internal climate-control system by which plants respond to seasonal temperature changes,
That would help resolve what is going on in the plant communities. Xu says he has plans to study the reaction to warmer winter temperatures at the species level to understand the phenology changes in detail
where there are thousands on a plant, it's kind of hard to release enough sterile insects to do any good,
and studied fossilized plant materials to work out how the land was used. The soil layers revealed signs of rising water tables and the remnants of flood deposits.
Fossilized plant remains at these sites show that the Maya were growing crops such as avocados, grass species and maize.
Now a team partly supported by rival chocolate company Hershey has become the first to get a genome of the valuable plant into a peer-reviewed journal1.
compared with 71 in the well-studied but less flavoursome plant thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana),
and even in other relatives of the plant such as apples and peaches, all members of the Rosaceae family.
'The law was intended originally to control the use of GM plants in agriculture, but evolved to cover all organisms,
But in August, the ministry of agriculture published regulations for the law which seem to allow the contained use of GM plants and animals in education and research
and open-field trials with GM plants. Approval procedures for such experiments are in line with those in countries of the European union.
but has yet to finalize any loan guarantees for companies wanting to build pilot plants.
and to push forward with a new demonstration plant in Florida. This isn't something where you need a miracle to get there,
Samples of wild plants will now be conserved alongside existing stores of domesticated seeds (such as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen.
Nature Newsresearchers have traced the key genetic changes that enabled the plant pathogen responsible for the 1845 Irish potato famine (Phytophthora infestans) to jump from wild plant hosts to cultivated potatoes.
says study author Sophien Kamoun, a plant pathologist and head of the Sainsbury Laboratory, a not-for-profit plant science company in Norwich,
a molecular plant pathologist at Imperial College London, UK, and his team found that B. graminis genes responsible for infection
Developing a better grip on the molecular make-up and evolution of plant pathogens, current control methods can be targeted better slowing the chances that they evolve resistance,
After artemisinin At least US$175 million is needed to halt the spread of malaria parasites that are resistant to artemisinins,
Of this, some $60 million should be used to boost research activities including developing classes of antimalarials to replace the artemisinins, currently the most potent antimalaria drugs.
Creating drought-tolerant plants has proved to be a difficult challenge for plant breeders. Whereas resistance to a particular herbicide might be pinned down to one gene, the response to drought plays out across the genome.
A plant's resilience also depends on when drought strikes early or late in the life cycle, for instance and on
cut generous feed in tariffs (the price an electricity utility must pay to generators of solar energy) by capping the subsidized hours that solar plants can sell.
Research Plant catalogue A working list of known land plant species 墉 a key tool for conservation efforts 墉 was released at the end of 2010 (see www. theplantlist. org.
it is impossible to find everything published about a plant unless you know all of its scientific synonyms.
Nature Newsan international effort to protect coastal wetlands by assigning them carbon credits kicked off last week in Paris. The aim is to do for some wetland plants mangroves, seagrasses and salt marshes
Wetland plants and forests act as carbon sinks, locking away substantial amounts of carbon absorbed from the atmosphere.
Oceanographer Christoph Heinze at the University of Bergen, Norway, points out that the carbon sequestration abilities of wetland plants are
Business Biofuel offering Gevo, a company that genetically modifies microbes to produce chemicals from plant sugars,
The study takes advantage of the fact that plants preferentially take up the isotope carbon-12,
You argue that attempts to attribute the degree of local changes, for example declines in individual plant and animal species,
which is out-competing the butterfly's host plant. This is further aided by air pollution from Los angeles and San diego,
So how is climate change affecting Earth's flora and fauna? Climate change is impacting biodiversity worldwide.
Plants and animals often respond to rising winter temperatures whether due to climate change or to increased urbanization,
Likewise, many terrestrial plants and insects are moving or expanding pole-wards. Are these not clear fingerprints of climate change?
And many take an interest in conservation of the world's flora, often by fostering rare species. But they aren't always a force for good
Hulme says that many invasive plant species escaped from botanic gardens, and that the gardens do not do enough to keep their collections in check.
and he could see that many of the plants in the site had come from the garden.
Hulme first looked at the 34 plants on an International Union for Conservation of Nature list of 100 of the worst invasive species. For 19 of the 34,
or alien plants to naturalize in new places, or at least knew nothing of the threat they might pose to native ecosystems.
whether areas with more botanic gardens had more alien plants living there. He used published accounts of the Gross domestic product, population density and alien species diversity of 26 counties.
But 12%of the variation in alien-plant richness seems to be down to botanic gardens.
wherein they promise to keep an eye on potential invasive plants, and few have undertaken any kind of risk assessment of their operations.
many share the sense that the era of botanic gardens as intentional introducers of plants to new areas is long past and that, these days,
Widespread adoption of such guidelines might just change the plants and trees that visitors see at botanic gardens.
Funding to help save plant diversity secured: Nature Newsan international treaty aimed at protecting and improving access to the world's plant genetic resources has obtained more than US$10 million from donors to fund its second round of research grants for helping
to conserve global food security. The funding was confirmed at a meeting of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture this week in Bali, Indonesia.
The treaty is known best for its role in paving the way for construction of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway.
and Bhatti had feared that some projects would not be funded (See Boost for conservation of plant gene assets).
says that conserving global plant genetic diversity is the only way to develop crops that are adapted to changing climates and resistant to new diseases.
aims to create plants that can withstand strains of the evolving stem-rust pathogen Ug99.
Events Cleanup visions for Fukushima As workers continue to douse stricken reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant with water,
On 17 april, the Tokyo electric power Company (whose executives are pictured at a harried press conference six days earlier) put forward a plan to stabilize the plant within six to nine months.
Plants can be fortified either through conventional plant breeding or using biotechnology to alter its genome
a plant geneticist and the director of the Biocassava Plus Program, based in St louis, Missouri.
Nature Newsradiation released by the tsunami-struck Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant could have long-lasting consequences for the natural environment in the vicinity of the damaged Plant scientists estimate that in the first 30 days after the accident on 11 march, trees,
the harm would probably have been much more severe, especially for plants. Radiation effects on egg hatching and the survival of newborn mammals still need to be surveyed
But since the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, the spot price has dropped by about 16%,reflecting uncertainty about prospects for nuclear energy.
Three reactors at the plant, which some seismologists have dubbed the most dangerous in the country,
if other nuclear plants under inspection following the Fukushima disaster are ordered also to close. Spanish shake-up A wide-ranging bill that updates 1986 legislation on Spain's science system was expected to pass Congress this week,
the negative effect of climate change on plant growth has cut wheat production by 2. 5,
together with an international team, is studying the long-term ecological and health consequences of the 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine.
and that this molecular trade-off is shaping bird populations around the former nuclear power plant.
Mousseau is now in talks with Japanese colleagues to plan studies there following the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.
Beachy, a prominent plant biologist who retains a position at Washington University in St louis, has worked doggedly to raise the political profile of agricultural research
The aim is to spot pockets of plant growth by combining a measure of the'greenness'of an area with infrared data that reveal water content.
Funding Plant grants Fifteen plant-biology researchers have won a total of US$75 million from two private US foundations for their work.
who studies the development of plant roots from stem cells, and Xuemei Chen (pictured) at the University of California, Riverside,
and the animals it houses, all survived unscathed a massive chemical explosion at a nearby plant on 14 june.
the Cambrian Mountains are almost perfectly the wrong place to plant trees, says Bateman. The area is made up of peat land,
They have created a digital catalogue of the chemical and optical properties of some 4, 700 plant species in different conditions.
and the compounds that plants use to protect themselves against the Sun and predators. In specimens from one region of the Amazon rainforest in southern Peru, Asner and his wife, Robin Martin, identified 21 spectral traits that provided identifying signals for 90%of the species. A lot of people look at trees
and should enable the detection of many more plants. No one can say for certain what the implications of these new data might be,
and to tease out relationships among plants. After the aerial data identified areas in which the canopy was depleted unusually of nitrogen,
and discovered that an invasive ginger plant was competing with native trees for the nutrient.
These are based not on a plant's GM nature but on the techniques used for its genetic modification.
and consultation typically required by the regulators for GM plants, although the company says there are no plans to market this particular variety.
because the regulations for GM plants derive from the Federal Plant Pest Act, a decades-old law intended to safeguard against plant pathogens from overseas.
Previous types of GM plants are covered because they they were made using plant pathogens. The bacterium Agrobacterium tumefaciens which can cause tumours on plants shuttled foreign genes into plant genomes.
Developers then used genetic control elements derived from pathogenic plant viruses such as the cauliflower mosaic virus to switch on the genes.
By revealing similar elements in plants'DNA, genome sequencing has liberated developers from having to borrow the viral sequences.
And Agrobacterium is not essential either; foreign genes can be fired into plant cells on metal particles shot from a'gene gun'.
'Scotts took advantage of both techniques to construct the herbicide-resistant Kentucky bluegrass that put the USDA's regulatory powers to the test.
The Plant Pest Act was completely inappropriate for regulating biotech crops, but the USDA jury-rigged it, says Bill Freese, science-policy analyst at the Center for Food safety in WASHINGTON DC.
Now we can foresee this loophole getting wider and wider as companies turn more to plants and away from bacteria and other plant-pest organisms.
The USDA has made not public any plans to close the loophole and has indicated also that it will not broaden its definition of noxious weeds,
Many companies are developing'mini-chromosomes'that can function in a plant cell without needing to be integrated into the plant's genome.
this technology will be used well by many as a way to deliver large stacks of genes to plants,
-or under-regulating GM plants, says Roger Beachy, a plant biologist at Washington University in St louis, Missouri,
But early studies of how the radiation has accumulated in plants and the soil now suggest that farmers in much of the region can go back to work.
Soon after the meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi, the government evacuated people living within 30 Â kilometres of the plant,
Nakanishi is coordinating seven teams to study the impact of the disaster on soil, plants, animals, fisheries and forests for the next decade,
and could be washed off, suggesting that the plants were not absorbing dangerous levels of radioisotopes directly from the soil.
with most of the radiation in plants accumulated on their surfaces. Wheat leaves that were open at the time of the greatest fallout were contaminated heavily,
Wheat ears from these plants contained 300-500 Bq kg-1 within the prescribed radiation limit.
The agriculture ministry is also testing how well plants can clean the soil in highly contaminated areas,
you're still left with the problem of how to dispose of the radioactive plants. Burying the soil is expensive, however.
making the plant produce toxins that confer resistance to some insect pests. A Bt cotton variety is being developed for Kenyan farmers at KARI.
especially in developing countries, says Sarah Gurr, a molecular plant pathologist at the University of Oxford, UK,
Maryland, is the brainchild of Gary Stacey, an expert in host-microbe interactions in plants at the University of Missouri in Columbia.
After a stint chairing the public-affairs committee for the American Society of Plant Biologists in Rockville
and industry scientists along with representatives from funding agencies and growers'associations to draw up a ten-year plan for plant biology.
and informatics to the field's grand, overarching goal of predicting how a plant with a given set of genes will fare in different environments.
With the plant summit, he hopes to bridge a sometimes acrimonious divide between researchers who specialize in crops and those who work with model systems such as Arabidopsis thaliana,
Stacey and organizers at the American Society of Plant Biologists hope to issue a report by early 2012,
Microorganisms in their guts may help the endangered animals to subsist on plants despite a gut that is better suited to eating meat,
most of its calories are locked in hard-to-digest cellulose fibres that make up plant cell walls.
for example, cows and other ruminants have complicated digestive systems involving multiple stomachs filled with microbes that process plants many times to extract the maximum nutrition.
and pseudo-thumbs, bones that allow them to grip plant stalks that help pandas to live on bamboo,
Plant Microbe Interact. 20,717-726; 2007). ) A product of more than a decade of homegrown research, the bean could begin appearing on tables across the country as early as 2014.
a plant geneticist who led the work for the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (EMBRAPA), the research arm of the Ministry of Agriculture,
says Rubens Nodari, a plant geneticist at the Federal University of Santa catarina in Florianopolis. Environmental groups and a presidential advisory panel, the National Council for Food security and Nutrition, have called for more transparency in biotechnology science and decision-making,
a biotechnologist at The swiss Federal Institute of technology in Zurich, adds that plants naturally produce similar RNA snippets to defend themselves from viral attack,
And insects attracted to the plants provided extra food for the fish. More from Scidev.
The Genkai Nuclear power Plant in southwestern Japan was shut down briefly in October because of a technical fault,
But concerns over nuclear safety mean that no other plants closed since the earthquake and tsunami on 11 march have been allowed to restart.
and even plants. It's interesting what happened to the mammoth, he says. But when we think about species today,
16 22 december 2011cold shutdown The three reactors at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant that had meltdowns in early March have now been brought to a state of'cold shutdown,
and residents who once lived near the plant will not be able to return until the land has been decontaminated.
Coming up 16 december The Japanese government is expected to announce that the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has reached cold shutdown a declaration that the stricken reactors have reached stable
and store carbon emissions from power plants, allowing Western countries to finance these plants more cheaply in India or China.
and have turned to different feedstocks including switchgrass, the succulent plant jatropha, cyanobacteria and green algae. However, producing biofuels from sugar cane
this year his team will demonstrate the feasibility of their ethanol-production process at a pilot plant being built in Chile
And because ozone is toxic to plants, such measures could boost global crop production by 1-4%.The United nations Environment Programme explored the potential gains in a detailed assessmentlast June (see go. nature. com/4wcwxf).
they can separate out carbon uptake and emissions by plants and soils.""The better we understand both the magnitude and distribution of human emissions,
And almost all of the United states emissions of trifluoromethane (also known as HFC-23), a potent greenhouse gas, come from just two facilities the Honeywell International plant in Baton rouge, Louisiana,
Safer reactors France's nuclear regulator is demanding stringent safety upgrades for the country's reactors in response to the disaster at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant.
The site is adjacent to the KSU Biosecurity Research Institute, a BSL-3 facility that studies animal and plant pathogens.
whether to introduce crop-specific indirect land-use change (ILUC) factors that recognize the extra emissions that plant feedstocks cause by displacing food crops,
Ash-covered forest is'Permian Pompeii'An ancient swampy forest full of long-extinct plant species has been brought to life through analyses of well-preserved fossils entombed in a layer of volcanic ash.
what is now northern China created a time capsule that reveals an almost unprecedented level of detail about the region s flora,
Palaeoecologists can usually only infer the richness of an ancient forest ecosystem by piecing together fossils of plant fragments of varying ages.
The researchers reconstructed the ancient ecosystem by analysing the positions of individual plants across three sites that together cover more than 1, 000 square metres.
Species from six plant groups lived there, Pfefferkorn and his team report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1.
"Many of these plant groups we knew from other places, but we had no idea that they actually grew together.
Nuclear cleanup The Japanese government has threatened to withhold about ¥1 trillion (US$12. 8 billion) in rescue funds for the private company that runs the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant,
and clean up the plant after it was hit by a tsunami last year. But, Edano said,
Synbio troubles US synthetic biology firm Amyris which engineers microbes to process plant sugars into useful chemicals saw its share price plunge by 28%on 10 february,
Meanwhile, Australian scientists have found DNA from critically endangered species and potentially toxic plants in traditional Chinese medicines6.
whether a specific plant or animal is present. But mislabelling is rampant so researchers do not always know what to look for
The researchers can then check the genetic sequences against databases to learn which plants or animals they come from.
They identified 68 families of plants, including a poisonous herb called Ephedra and the woody vine Aristolochia.
Other medicines contained DNA from plants in the same family as ginseng the root of which is illegal to trade internationally as well as soya and nut-bearing plants,
because plant genetic databases are incomplete. The researchers also found DNA from eight genera of vertebrate animals.
Million-year-old ash hints at origins of cookinggreatstock Photographic Library/Alamythe plant and animal ash was found thirty metres inside the Wonderwerk Cave beyond the reach of a lightning strike.
"The next thing, says Johnathan Napier, a plant biotechnologist at Rothamsted Research in Harpenden, UK,"is to link this genome sequence to traits that are useful and important, especially for food security and human health
the plant known as pigweed or palmer amaranth (Amaranthus palmeri) isn t much to look at. But to farmers in the southeastern United states, it is a formidable foe.
the plants can break down both of the chemicals in Dow s newly formulated herbicide Enlist."
) Mortensen expects that increased reliance on two herbicides will favour plants with multiple mutations for resistance to each,
as well as the emergence of plants with more general survival strategies, such as the ability to break up certain molecular structures
The USDA and the agrochemical industry are looking into the use of the natural chemical defences of plants and microbes to control weeds.
the fibrous material in plants. Instead, the company will"refocus its strategy and activities, leading to a smaller development programme and the loss of 150 jobs,
Although the plant s production capacity is nearly 2 million litres per year, its output peaked at just 581,042 litres in 2009.
and in 2011 it decided not to set up a plant in central Saskatchewan.""This shouldn t be seen as a black mark on the industry,
says Stephen."Cellulosic ethanol plants cost four to six times more than corn ethanol plants. Iogen Corporationiogen's cellulosic ethanol has powered Formula 1 race cars.
Enerkem, which runs a commercial demonstration plant in Westbury, Quebec, produces a mixture of gasoline, diesel,
as different plants incorporate varying amounts of carbon-13 relative to carbon-12. The team found that the milk fats came from a range of plants,
potentially suggesting that the people milking the animals moved around a lot, Evershed says. They may even have grazed their cattle up and down mountains,
because sulphadoxine and pyrimethamine were used to treat the disease before the wormwood wonder drug artemisinin became the gold standard cure.
Plant breeders are also working to improve the performance of maize under environmental stress using both conventional breeding and genetic modification.
and genetically modifying plants to feed the world s population. go. nature. com/m128l22 August The governing board of the Cancer Prevention
but without tortoises  once the island s dominant herbivore  there is a danger that some plant species could be choked out and lost.
His research has focused on the fundamental nature of the relationships between plants and insects and the development of tools for managing insect pests.
at the Ohi plant in Fukui prefecture, on 1 july despite last-ditch protests against its reopening (see go. nature. com/tjylu4.
when it is burned is roughly the same as that absorbed as the plant grows. But vast swathes of forest have been cut down to make way for the crop, often in carbon-rich peatlands,
Bob Goldberg, a plant geneticist at the University of California, Los angeles, says the proposition is"anti-science,
So Allison Kermode, a plant biologist at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby Canada, whose husband works with people who have lysosomal storage disorders,
When human proteins such as enzymes are expressed in plant cells, they are decorated usually with plant-specific sugar molecules,
which could prompt a dangerous immune reaction if injected into patients. But today in Nature Communications1, Kermode and her colleagues describe how they avoided these modifications.
or engineering plants to modify proteins differently a time-consuming approach that often does not work.
  Other plant systems have been used to make therapeutic proteins. In May, the US Food and Drug Administration approved Elelyso (taliglucerase alfa) a drug for the lysosomal storage disorder Gaucher disease which is produced in cultured carrot cells.
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