Boost for conservation of plant gene assets: Nature Newsan international treaty aimed at protecting and improving access to the world's plant genetic resources is set to dole out its first round of research grants this week amid cash-flow problems that could endanger future awards.
The grants, which will support research into new crop varieties and plant-conservation efforts in developing countries,
mark the fifth anniversary of the adoption of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture by the Food and Agricultural organization of the United nations. The treaty is known best for its role in paving the way for construction of the Svalbard Global
Seed Vault in Norway an underground cavern containing a stock of plant seeds from around the world.
Some 120 nations are party to the treaty, and those that have ratified it are legally bound to pass on genetic information about the world's 64 most important food crops,
and plant breeders who are searching for crops that can withstand the effects of climate change or emerging diseases.
the treaty's governing body is expected to award a total of US$250, 000 to between four and seven plant-research and conservation projects.
David Ellis, curator of the Plant Genetic Resources Preservation Program within the US Department of agriculture's research service, says it has become standard practice for genetic material to be accessed
where more carbon is bound up in plants and soil. Areas that are protected not formally, and thus are most likely to be cleared in the future,
Nature Newsjapanese research teams have pinpointed the genes in hardy varieties of rice that help the plants to outgrow rising paddy-field waters
says Michael jackson, a plant physiologist at the University of Bristol, UK. In the first study, published in Nature1 on 19 august, Motoyuki Ashikari, at Nagoya University in Japan,
and his colleagues found two genes that help plants to keep their leaves above water when partially submerged.
Most rice plants (Oryza sativa) die if completely submerged for more than a few days. But some rice varieties can survive the conditions by rapidly shooting up in height.
These plants are typically far less productive however, so researchers have sought the genes responsible for flood tolerance in the hope of introducing them into high-yielding rice varieties.
In 2006, a team led by David Mackill at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines discovered similar flood-tolerance genes a genetic cluster called Submergence 1 that allowed plants to survive for more than two weeks
Some rice plants are resistant to the pernicious fungus responsible the disease, but the rice from these plants often has undesirable qualities,
such as lower stickiness and poor flavour, so they have not been introduced into widely consumed rice varieties.
and showed that plants with two rare deletions had around 10 times fewer blast lesions than wild-type rice,
yet these same plants tasted awful. Fukuoka's group crossed the resistance gene into a tastier breed
This mimics the natural defensive strategies of many plants, which release volatile organic compounds to attract pest enemies
they interspersed transgenic and normal maize plants, and infested the plots with rootworm before releasing around 600,000 nematode parasites.
and 60%fewer adult rootworm beetles emerged from such plants. Although the team has created not a commercially viable crop,
The main problem is that researchers don't know the key compounds to target in most plants.
if it were not being emitted continually by the plants it would be better to guide the nematodes to the plants most in need of protection,
His team's next step is to work out ways of making plants emit the compound only when under attack by pests.
Iran has admitted to having a second uranium-enrichment plant. On 25 september, the US, French and British premiers held a press conference to announce their intelligence on the site.
The plant, not yet in operation, is thought to be big enough to hold around 3, 000 gas centrifuges,
the company has pushed now the plant's start-up date to late 2010 or early 2011.
the US Department of energy selected Bluefire and five other companies to negotiate for up to US$385 million in funding for commercial-scale plants.
Two of the six companies selected by the Department of energy to negotiate for commercial plant funding have dropped out of the programme,
and several plants belonging to other companies have been delayed. The industry has slowed down tremendously, says Sean O'Hanlon, executive director of the American Biofuels Council in Miami, Florida.
originally planned to complete the final phase of construction on a Georgia commercial plant in 2011
suspended operations on an Idaho plant to focus its resources on a possible plant in Saskatchewan, says company spokesperson Mandy Chepeka.
The joint venture has applied for a loan guarantee from the US energy department to build a commercial-scale plant in Florida,
) Once the first few cellulosic-ethanol plants have been built, people might move on to other fuels such as biobutanol
And the plant delays are giving alternative technologies a chance to catch up. But the slowdown could also benefit those who produce cellulosic ethanol,
The National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) opens its doors on 1 Â October, with plant biotechnologist Roger Beachy at its helm.
Beachy worked on virus resistance in plants, and later collaborated closely with Monsanto, the leading producer of genetically engineered seed, on transgenic crops.
a plant that could lift developing countries out of poverty and into a sustainable oily future.
Early investors are now realizing the plant's limitations. Jatropha can live in very dry conditions,
The plant takes three years or more to reach maturity, requiring care along the way.
It has collected samples from jatropha plants growing wild in different environments and is creating a library of genetic material from
where it provides jatropha seeds for farmers to plant among other crops or on spare land that is unsuitable for food crops.
and the first real second-generation plants will be planted next year. So although jatropha may not be a saviour plant,
transforming vast quantities of desert land into biofuel-producing moneymakers, it is likely to find its niche as a local alternative in certain developing countries.
Speaking at a General motors Co. plant in Lordstown, Ohio, on Tuesday, President Barack Obama asserted that the regulations will give companies long-overdue clarity,
consumes and rots the leaves and tubers of the plant. The mould still afflicts potatoes, tomatoes and related plants,
and costs farmers around the world an estimated $6. 7 billion a year1. Now Chad Nusbaum, co-director of the Broad Institute's genome sequencing and analysis programme in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
In the arms race between plant and pathogen, potatoes have had long an ally: human plant breeders, who have struggled to develop blight-resistant spuds.
The breeders have been working in the genetic dark, however, not knowing exactly what genes they are promoting or
plant pathologists will be working flat out on new strategies for breeders based on how the blight operates and its potential weaknesses.
I would hope that some clever plant pathologist would be able to genetically engineer resistance.
But the Christian Democratic Union and its junior coalition partner, the liberal Free Democratic party, will not revise an existing ban on building new nuclear plants.
but the administration of former US President George w bush avoided this in part by creating a market-based system that would allow mercury emissions to continue at some plants
and caused the plants to produce a protein inducing resistance to the antibiotic kanamycin. However, an expert committee dismissed these concerns,
Nearly 40%of animal and plant species in the country's arid and semiarid ecosystems are in danger from habitat loss,
Currently, research on 82 human, plant and animal pathogens (called select agents) is monitored under a 1996 law that requires the same security procedures for all of them.
Arkema's plant in Mont, France, should be turning out 400 tonnes per year by 2011.
In the past month, Monsanto and Dow Agrisciences have received government permission to plant transgenic maize across 24 plots,
and the plants perform. We want to see how the planting will work in these conditions,
of UNAM's Institute of Ecology in Mexico city, questions whether the company's methods are sensitive enough to detect transgenes after several generations of plant growth.
Reichman noted that Alvarez-Buylla showed newly grown test plants believed to harbour transgenes were resistant to herbicide,
The 2. 3-billion-base sequence the largest genetic blueprint yet worked out for any plant species includes more than 32,000 protein-coding genes spread across maize's 10 chromosomes.
What we have here is a crucial part of the instruction manual for how you breed a better corn plant
and breed those desired traits into new generations of plants. Joachim Messing, director of the Plant Genome Initiative at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New jersey,
who was involved not in the sequencing, says he was surprised by how well previous analyses based on small snippets of the genome predicted some of the overall trends.
and plant breeding are really major. Herrera-Estrella's team also found more than a dozen genes related to heavy-metal detoxification
Recombination is necessary for plant breeders to unite favourable genes from different crop varieties in a single plant.
rather than having to grow entire plants to assess whether the traits conferred by those haplotypes are present.
such as those that allow the plant to thrive with reduced fertilizer and nutrient input, or that boost the plant's drought tolerance, he adds.
Over centuries and millennia maize breeders have made great strides in producing bigger, better and tastier corn, says Schnable.
A combination of two gene regions, known as rbcl and matk, will be used as a'bar code'to uniquely identify every species of land plant, biologists announced last week at the Third International Barcode of Life Conference
Spraying the herbicide glyphosate on coca plants is a key tool in the war on cocaine.
helping it to penetrate plants'leaves. Keith Solomon of the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, led a team working in Colombia,
The records show that agricultural plants dramatically disappeared and were replaced by weeds; eventually the weeds died
This includes building a processing plant to produce an experimental biological control agent, a nucleopolyhedrovirus,
These data imply that early Homo sapiens from southern Africa consumed not just underground plant staples,
varying not only among species but also between different parts of a plant. Even if sorghum is truly present at the site,
researchers have engineered a bacterium that can convert a form of raw plant biomass directly into clean, road-ready diesel.
and is made from crop plants such as maize (corn) and sugarcane, putting vehicles in competition with hungry mouths.
which makes up the bulk of plant material. It's a nice milestone in the field of biofuels,
The company plans to open a commercial-scale demonstration plant later this year.
Senate climate debate up in the air: Nature Newshaving passed climate legislation in the House of representatives last June, Democrats in the US Congress were hoping to push climate legislation through the Senate this spring.
Like any animal or plant, they are made out of carbon. And whales are so big they each store a lot of carbon,
The US Department of energy on 16 february issued an US$8. 3-billion loan guarantee for a pair of nuclear power plants in Georgia,
The Obama administration hopes to issue loan guarantees for seven to ten plants countrywide, to build confidence in the industry.
but some scientists say that it will set back Indian plant-biotechnology research. On 9 february, environment minister Jairam Ramesh announced an indefinite moratorium on the cultivation of a transgenic version of aubergine,
We have no less than ten GM products to get into the regulatory system for trials including brinjal, chickpea, sorghum, sugar cane, castor oil plant,
project director for plant biotechnology at the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) in New delhi.
and geneticist and plant scientist David Baulcombe got the agriculture prize for his discovery of small interfering RNA in plants,
In many plants, 108 out of 10,000 carbon atoms are carbon-13. However in plants such as sugar cane and maize (corn),
which use a different type of photosynthesis, 110 out of 10,000 atoms are carbon-13.
and most plants should have, explains Peck. The reason, he suggests, is released that carbon from the burning of oil or coal,
The term geoengineering covers everything from mundane methods for increasing carbon storage in plants soils
Besides sharing a handful of genes with L bicolor that encode enzymes to degrade plant cell walls,
the truffle lacks most of the genes that are involved in L. bicolor's symbiotic relationship with plants.
Plant biologists fear for cress project: Nature Newsthe brilliant career of a diminutive weed may have hit a snag.
Arabidopsis thaliana has been the darling of plant biologists for some 30 years because of its small genome and rapid growth,
and in 2000 it became the first plant to have sequenced its genome. To capitalize on this, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) soon afterwards dedicated US$200 million towards determining the function of every Arabidopsis gene by 2010.
Arabidopsis researchers fear that the plant's popularity with funders is on the wane. The appeal of Arabidopsis is as a stand-in for unwieldy food crops that grow slowly
By studying thousands of plants in a single greenhouse, scientists can conduct experiments in a fraction of the time
rather than relying on a model plant. There's obviously a drive back to increased funding of crop plant research,
says Mark Stitt at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology in Potsdam, Germany.
This is fair and good, but there is a quite serious risk that some of the advances made in Arabidopsis research in the past ten years may not be sustained.
whose constituent genes have overlapping functions a common phenomenon in plants. Knocking out one gene in the family often did not affect the plant
because other genes were able to compensate. When the programme was designed, there was this idea that
says Philip Benfey, a plant biologist at Duke university in Durham, North carolina. The reality was complicated much more.
an approach that would use the large data sets generated in the 2010 programme to develop models of plant function.
The NSF's Plant Genome Research Program and the Department of agriculture's competitive funding programme have favoured increasingly grants for work on agricultural species in recent years.
Researchers developing ways to turn cellulose into ethanol need to know how plants build their cell walls,
he notes that the extensive data already available for Arabidopsis make it the best species to advance plant systems biology.
for example, using data collected from many different plants, he says. Even crop researchers have a good word for the little weed.
It's very important for the entire plant and agricultural community that Arabidopsis research should continue to be funded. says Edward Buckler, a maize geneticist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New york. Â
Breeders of GM CROPS use antibiotic-resistance markers to spot which plants have incorporated successfully transgenes. They attach the antibiotic-resistance gene onto the desired trait genes,
which kills those plants that haven't taken up the foreign genes. Environmental groups and some countries have had longstanding concerns about the risk of genes spreading from crops to bacteria and increasing bacterial antibiotic resistance.
and concluded that the risk of transfer of antibiotic resistance from plants to bacteria was remote,
or allow such markers to be spliced out of the plant before cultivation. Indeed, although the EU, the World health organization and many health bodies accept that the risk of transfer of antibiotic resistance seems low
and plants have been modified genetically with Bt genes since 1996 so crops such as corn and potato can produce the crystal proteins,
involving, for example, concepts such as crop rotation, complements of animals and plants, and the use of animal waste as fertilizer,
Diet will also be a major determinant in our capacity to nourish the world animal products require considerably more energy and land than plants.
plants and animals suggesting that the species'habitat was likely to have been a more open savannah with some trees rather than woods;
and the types of silica-rich plant remnants called phytoliths. The Cerling group contends that the abundance of small-mammal fossils at the site which White's group says supports a woodland environment could be due to predators hiding in vegetation growing around water
stopping the fungus from further infecting the plant. They are two of the most important genes in wheat
and Europe, says Ronnie Coffman, a plant-breeding scientist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New york. He warns that in the next few years,
It attacks the stems of wheat plants by destroying vascular tissue so that plants can no longer stand upright.
Infected plants produce fewer seeds and may die. The fungus can devastate harvests: for example, farmers in the Narok region of Kenya lost up to 80%of their wheat crop due to Ug99 in 2007.
In total, seven mutant strains of the fungus are known now, including the latest forms, originally identified in South africa in 2007 and 2009.
and the wheat plants have fewer defences against infection, says Pretorius. Pretorius and his team analysed the genomes of the new stem rust variants
The fungus and its variants are now able to overcome at least 32 of around 50 resistance genes, according to Ravi Singh, a plant geneticist and pathologist at the Mexico-based International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre.
Carbon dioxide is released also by plants and animals so to gain an accurate picture of the contribution of fossil-fuel burning,
and by plants, but fossil fuels have no carbon-14 because it has a relatively short half-life
and larger plants than conventional farming is sure to reignite longstanding debates about the merits of organic versus conventional agriculture.
resulting in fewer potato-munching beetles and larger potato plants. Although the work of Crowder and his group does not address the issue of yields from organic versus conventional farms
their study found that the increased evenness of organic farms compared with that of conventional farms led to 18%lower pest densities and 35%larger plants.
Bigger plants generally mean greater potato yields. At least as important as what the research says about organic farming is
to clean the plant will cause shortages of three drugs, including one used to treat thyroid cancer.
Consulting with village elders, she helped identify the proper plant roots for natural dyes, which improved the weavers'business.
The Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry in St petersburg, which runs the station, has a month to appeal the decision.
Fire-fighting measures were stepped up in the town of Ozersk in the Chelyabinsk region where one of Russia's largest nuclear-waste plants,
since the plants were introduced in the early 1990s. Last year, nearly half the world's transgenic crops were grown in US soil Brazil
They also found some plants that were resistant to both herbicides, showing that the different GM plants had bred to produce a plant with a new trait that did not exist anywhere else.
Sagers says the previous discoveries in other countries of transgenic canola populations growing outside of cultivation were often in
The researchers took samples of plants at 8-kilometre intervals along roads in North dakota from 4 june to 23 july 2010.
The number of B. napus plants in each sample plot was counted and one plant was collected
They also found two plants that contained both transgenes. Sagers says the discovery of plants that are resistant to both herbicides shows that these feral populations of canola have been part of the landscape for several generations.
whether these escaped GM canola plants have any ecological consequences. But those that have evolved resistance to both herbicides could become a weed problem for farmers,
Sagers blames the delay in discovering escaped populations of transgenic plants in the United states largely on the lack of funding for research in this area.
Those familiar with canola know that these plants are readily found on roadsides and in areas near farmers'fields.
Alison Snow, an ecologist at Ohio State university in Columbus, says it is not surprising that escaped transgenic plants have now been found in the United states,
which is required for plant growth. In its phosphate form, phosphorus is a vital part of the cell's genetic material,
Chinese researchers presented their findings on China's phosphate use at the 4th International Symposium on Phosphorus Dynamics in the Plant-Soil Continuum in Beijing.
Zhang Fusuo, a plant nutritionist at the China Agricultural University in Beijing, says China has 9%of the world's arable land
close to 80%of cropland in China contained less than 10 milligrams of phosphate available to plants per kilogram of soil indicating a phosphate deficiency.
technologies are needed to improve the efficiency of phosphate use by plants, researchers at the symposium said;
plants take up less than 15%of phosphate in the soil. Zhang and his colleagues are trying to crank that up by manipulating the chemistry and biology of the rhizosphere, the narrow layer of soil surrounding roots.
The blooms consume much of the oxygen dissolved in the water, killing fish and other plant life,
a plant scientist who is director of the National Research Centre for Plant Biotechnology and a known proponent of GM CROPS.
Threats to the world's plants assessed: Nature Newsmore than 20%of the world's 380,000 plant species are at risk of extinction,
making plants more threatened than birds, according to the first global analysis of the status of plant biodiversity.
The risk assessment, called the Sampled Red List Index for Plants, was conducted by plant scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK,
and is published today. It finds that gymnosperms or seed-bearing plants including conifers and cycads, are the most at-risk group of plants,
with more than 75%of cycad species currently threatened with extinction. Habitat loss, resulting from the conversion of natural habitats for agriculture and livestock grazing
is the biggest threat to plants'survival, the study concludes. Existing indicators of biodiversity such as the Red List of Threatened Species of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) focus mainly on vertebrates,
and have assessed only a handful of plants, says Eimear Nic Lughadha, a plant scientist at Kew and a lead researcher on the plant risk assessment.
By bringing plants into the equation we hope to get a broader and more accurate picture of
what is happening to the world's biodiversity, says Nic Lughadha. Stephen Harris, curator of the Oxford university Herbaria
UK, agrees that conservation efforts have been one-sided. When people think about what needs conserving, they rarely think about plants,
he says. Harris says he is not surprised that the study found cycads to be endangered the most group.
000 plants species including bryophytes (mosses and liverworts) and legumes (peas and beans) from the five major plant groups.
The researchers plan to reassess the threat status to plants in 2015. Using the data published today as a baseline
whether the risk to plants is growing with time. Stephen Hopper, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, says that the assessment will help countries to measure progress towards new targets to halt loss of the world's biodiversity by 2020,
Plants set stage for evolutionary drama: Nature Newsplants made the evolution of large, complex animals such as predatory fish possible,
and spread of higher plants probably drove the increase. The evolution of vascular plants completely changed history, allowing a high concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere to be sustained.
Grasshoppers that were exposed to spiders switched from eating protein-rich grasses to munching on several species of sugary goldenrod plants.
Instead of plants, the grasshoppers were fed with an artificial diet of high-sugar or protein-rich'biscuits'and he saw the same trend.
whether the physiological effects of stress on grasshoppers scale up to plants, soil, bacteria and onwards,
Two teams of scientists have decoded RNA from ancient crops in the hope of understanding the subtle evolutionary changes that accompanied the process of plant domestication.
Gilbert plans to collect maize samples that span the plant's 6, 000-year history as a domesticated crop from across The americas,
Terry Brown, a plant geneticist at the University of Manchester, UK, who is collaborating on the project,
along with the seeds showed that the seeds produced plants whose grains grow in rows of two, instead of the usual rows of six an adaptation to dry conditions.
What's more, plant seeds are the ideal tissue in which to study ancient RNA
From this perspective, fewer clouds and more sunlight could spur an initial increase in photosynthesis resulting in more plant growth,
Fedoroff is getting back to her roots in plant genetics by heading up a new centre for desert agriculture in Saudi arabia.
Flour residues recovered from 30,000-year-old grinding stones found in Italy, Russia and the Czech republic point to widespread processing and consumption of plant grain,
It's another nail in the coffin of the idea that hunter-gatherers didn't use plants for food,
whereas plants leave few relics. Complicating matters, archaeologists typically washed the grinding tools used to process plants,
removing any preserved plant matter, says Longo. Beginning in the early 2000s, Longo and her colleagues started analysing unwashed stone tools from a 28
000-year-old human settlement in central Italy called Bilancino. Patterns of wear on the sandstone tools suggest that they were used for grinding,
However, many of the plants found by Longo and her team were widely distributed, offering a reliable, even nutritious source of food,
I'm pretty sure that you're going to have many more cases where there is evidence for the use of plants by humans.
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011