Tide turns against corn ethanol: Nature Newsbuffeted by the economic crisis and a drop in the oil price,
US producers of corn ethanol are encountering increasing scepticism from the legislators on Capitol hill even as producers of the'greener'cellulose-derived ethanol struggle to move beyond basic research and development.
Producers of ethanol from corn (maize) starch got what they needed out of a tax package enacted by the US Congress last week:
Among them was a one-year extension of a tax credit giving refiners nearly 12 cents of federal cash for every litre of corn ethanol they blend into gasoline.
Critics say the corn ethanol credit eats up scarce federal resources and puts cellulosic ethanol at a competitive disadvantage.
director of renewable energy policy for the Natural resources Defense Council in New york. There's a sort of belief in Washington that corn ethanol is one of these topics where everyone has to toe the line,
and promises to corn-growing country, just like they always have. Rumours of the tax credit's demise may be a little bit premature,
Around 90%of the biofuel will come from conventional corn ethanol next year, with the remainder coming from biodiesel and other advanced biofuels.
Nature Newsresearch Policy Events People Business Trend watch Research Crop catalogue A global search to gather the wild relatives of essential food crops such as wheat,
barley and rice has been launched by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, based in Rome. The ten-year initiative, announced on 10 december,
which describes the genetic make-up of an unrelated powdery mildew (Blumeria graminis) that affects barley. Pietro Spanu
because the agencies looked at aggregate rather than independent annual yields of wheat, rice and other crops, explains Bruno Dorin, an economist at CIRAD and one of the report's authors.
In Asia the wheat yield may be lower, but if you take account of rice and other crops grown in the same year,
the total yield is higher, he says. Another finding to emerge is that major reserves of potential farmland exist across the globe, especially in Africa and Latin america,
Dorin says. The 1. 5 billion hectares of land now cultivated could be increased to 4 billion,
yields of wheat have stagnated in Europe and other major producing regions such as northern India, says Fran §ois Houllier, INRA's deputy director-general in charge of scientific organization, resources and evaluation.
For example, farmers stopped alternating wheat with pulses, which fix nitrogen in the soil, he says.
and the use of international consortiums to develop new production strategies for rice, wheat and other cereals.
announced plans to release a series of hybrid maize (corn) strains that can flourish with less water.
according to Marianne B ¤nziger, deputy director-general for research and partnerships at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in Mexico city.
Another study in The Holocene5 by Dorian Fuller, an archaeologist at University college London, explores methane emissions from livestock and the spread of rice agriculture in Southeast asia.
Fuller says that the expansion of rice could account for up to 80%of the additional atmospheric methane as of 1, 000 years ago,
including potatoes and wheat. The information, which can be held in gene banks or on farms, is freely available to researchers,
such as wheat and rice. And he calls for more research on orphan crops, such as quinoa (Chenopodium),
a grain-like crop originating in South america. No one is taking care of them. We need to invest in research in crops that feed the poor,
Wheat killer A research programme tackling a devastating wheat fungus has been granted US$40 million over five years as part of a partnership between the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington,
The Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat project, involving more than a dozen institutes and coordinated by Cornell University in Ithaca, New york,
Funding Golden rice funds The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is giving US$18. 6 million to research on transgenic, nutritionally fortified rice and cassava.
The International Rice Research Institute in Los Ba ae'Â os, the Philippines, won $10. 3 million to develop golden rice,
it hopes that the rice will receive regulatory approval in the Philippines in 2013 and in Bangladesh in 2015.
Nature Newsnearly US$20 million in new grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will be spent on getting nutritionally enhanced rice and cassava to market and decreasing malnourishment in Asia and Africa.
testing and marketing of Golden Rice, which is fortified with Vitamin a, in the Philippines and Bangladesh,
In parts of Asia, people rely on rice for 50-80%of their daily calories, and around 70 million Africans rely on cassava.
Several research groups are working on fortified varieties of bean, rice, maize, sweet potato, cowpea, peanut, wheat, pumpkin and banana.
Both Golden Rice and Biocassava Plus are modified genetically organisms (GMOS), and have attracted their fair share of negative attention from the anti-GMO lobby.
The Gates Foundation grants will help to generate the data needed for Golden Rice and Biocassava Plus to meet food safety and environmental regulations.
or consumers until they pass tests for biosafety in each country, says Gerard Barry, who coordinates the Golden Rice Network at the International Rice Research Institute in Los Ba  os
Golden Rice is expected to receive regulatory approval in the Philippines in 2013 and in Bangladesh in 2015, according to Ingo Potrykus, a retired geneticist at the Institute of Plant sciences in Zurich, Switzerland,
and one of the rice's inventors. Biocassava Plus should follow a few years later the team hopes to obtain approvals by 2017, according to Martin Fregene,
Global maize (corn) production, for example, is estimated to be about 3. 8%lower than it would have been in a non-warmed world the equivalent of Mexico not contributing to the maize market.
the negative effect of climate change on plant growth has cut wheat production by 2. 5,
%but boosted that of rice by 2. 9 %and soya beans by 1. 3%.It has also,
the 2010 climate-change programme awarded grants to researchers studying cereal crops such as maize (corn)
which took a year to control, cut cereal production by some 80%in the affected areas of Burkina faso and by at least 90%in those in Mali and Mauritania.
and oil and gas operations Ethanol subsidies The US Senate has voted to end costly federal subsidies for producing ethanol from maize (corn).
Wheat yields doubled between the 1960s and 2010 reaching around 8 tonnes per hectare, owing to the use of more productive crop varieties and fertilizers.
Switzerland, conducted the first field trials of maize (corn) containing engineered mini-chromosomes, and showed that the mini-chromosomes,
Wheat leaves that were open at the time of the greatest fallout were contaminated heavily, with combined levels of caesium-134 and caesium-137 ranging from thousands to about 1 Â million Bq kg-1. But leaves that unfolded afterwards were largely free of contamination.
Wheat ears from these plants contained 300-500 Bq kg-1 within the prescribed radiation limit.
Next in line will be Bt maize (corn also being developed by scientists at KARI, says Gichuki. Other crops undergoing confined field trials include virus-resistant sweet potatoes and drought-resistant maize,
It has proved surprisingly economically stable compared with major grain crops such as rice, wheat and maize (corn:
when wheat prices more than doubled on the international markets in 2008, and peaked again in 2010,
The possibilities for improvement through marker-assisted breeding and genetic modification could make the potato a more viable alternative to grain crops,
they've got more protein and more fibre than rice, with no fat, says Gurr.
Pepsico is always looking for data to evaluate its supplies of corn, potatoes, oranges and oats,
Nature Newspaired with rice or steeped in feijoada stew, beans are an essential feature of Brazilian cuisine.
behind the United states. Farmers have planted vast tracts of GM maize (corn), soya and cotton with little public resistance,
No to French GM ban France's highest court has overturned a national ban on the cultivation of a genetically modified maize (corn) crop,
Fish and rice flourish together in paddieswhen fish were introduced into flooded paddy fields, farmers were able to grow the same amount of grain as in conventional rice monocultures
but with more than two-thirds less pesticide and a quarter less fertiliser, found a six-year long study conducted in China.
These rice-fish co-cultures could lessen the environmental impact of agricultural chemicals and help make rice farming more profitable,
said the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science this week1.
In areas where land and water are limited for developing both rice and fish production it is important to conduct RF rice-fish co-culture,
Xin Chen, lead author of the study and a professor at Zhejiang University, China, told Scidev.
which typically represent 60-70 per cent of the total cost of rice production. Fish significantly lower the risk of rice sheath blast disease
and reduce the amount of weeds and harmful pests such as the rice planthopper. This invasive insect has the potential to devastate entire rice fields an outbreak in Thailand last year destroyed four per cent of the country's harvest.
By regulating the amount of nitrogen in the ecosystem, the practice also minimised the need for applying fertiliser.
Rice plants also provided shade, thus keeping the water cool and allowing fish to remain active even during the hottest months.
And insects attracted to the plants provided extra food for the fish. More from Scidev.
Zainul Abedin, a farming systems specialist at the International Rice Research Institute, in the Philippines, said:
The practice can generate twice as much income compared with growing just rice, because of refinements of the thousand year-old technique, made possible by new research,
Paul Kiepe, the Africa Rice Center's representative for East and Southern Africa told Scidev.
such as improved access to Arctic shipping routes owing to melting sea ice, increased wheat yields as a result of warmer conditions,
Many researchers are exploring ways to produce ethanol without using food crops such as sugar cane or maize (corn),
"The carbohydrates are compared rather exotic to traditional terrestrial sources like corn or sugar cane, says Yoshikuni."
grew 30.3 million hectares of GM soya, maize (corn) and cotton last year, a 19%increase on 2010.
Organic agriculture performs particularly poorly for vegetables and some cereal crops such as wheat, which make up the lion s share of the food consumed around the world.
Cereals and vegetables need lots of nitrogen to grow, suggesting that the yield differences are in large part attributable to nitrogen deficiencies in organic systems,
Next to receive a green light could be maize (corn) that is tolerant to glyphosphate and 2, 4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,
Its process uses enzymes to break down the cellulose in wheat oat and barley straw to glucose,
which is converted then to ethanol. Although the plant s production capacity is nearly 2 million litres per year,
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.
but also corn and cotton. It legalized the growing of GM CROPS in 2005, after it became clear that about three-quarters of the soya crops produced in the southern state of Rio grande do Sul were already being grown from Roundup Ready seeds that had been smuggled in from Argentina.
varo, president of the Mato grosso association of soya-bean and corn producers, agrees that intellectual property is important,
But wheat, rice and oil prices have not matched their 2008 highs so that will help to stave off a similar crisis,
S. Mccall/Getty Imagesus crops wilt in drought The most extensive US drought in more than half a century has seen prices for maize (corn)
Can you increase salt tolerance of crops such as rice, so that they can tolerate irrigation with sea water?
including wheat, rice and maize. In this way, they were able to build models relating yield solely to inputs
around 94%of the soya beans and 88%of the maize (corn) grown in the United states is engineered genetically to resist herbicides, insect pests or both, according to the US Department of agriculture.
go. nature. com/hyzgdfthe US Department of agriculture predicted on 10 Â August that the nation s maize (corn) yields would drop to a 17-year low in 2012-13 (see chart),
such as growing paddy rice a net methane source, which is responsible for 7 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent emissions in Brazil each year
Chandora says that the funding for paddy rice was a one-off offer an emergency response to flooding in southern Brazil last year.
Arsenic in rice Two US reports have reignited worries about arsenic poisoning from rice and prompted politicians to introduce legislation on 21 Â September that would limit the toxic substance.
and the US Food and Drug Administration released reports that found inorganic arsenic in rice products.
The presence of the substance is probably the result of the use of arsenic-based pesticides in cotton fields that were used later for rice farming.
and Chemical Toxicology, looked for adverse health effects in rats fed NK603 maize (corn), developed by biotech company Monsanto to resist the herbicide glyphosate
decided to develop a way to manufacture the necessary enzymes in maize (corn). When human proteins such as enzymes are expressed in plant cells,
And there particular advantages of packing transgenic proteins into corn kernels. Cereal crops can be grown using established methods,
including wheat, soya beans and potatoes. By 2050, climate change could cause irrigated wheat yields in developing countries to drop by 13,
%and irrigated rice could fall by 15%.%In Africa, maize yields could drop by 10-20%over the same time frame.
For some crops, improvements to heat resistance through conventional and transgenic breeding, for example, will help farmers to adapt.
and cereals were making acrylamide (C3h5no) as a by-product of the Maillard reaction, the very process that generates the heady blend of colour,
) GM study slammed A study claiming that rats fed Monsanto's genetically modified NK603 maize (corn) or its companion glyphosate-based herbicide,
suggests that farmers are making use of just 10-25%of the land where wheat can be grown profitably without irrigation.
Africa imports wheat because production lags behind consumption (see chart), but on the basis of modelling by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Texcoco, Mexico, the report suggests that farmers could boost domestic yields even in the face of global warming. 13-17 october The Society
for Neuroscience meets in New orleans, Louisiana. Featured topics include the changing ecosystem of global neuroscience
Missouri, has applied to plant 700,000 hectares of genetically modified maize (corn) in the country, and the new president will have to decide in the next few months
this has forced Brazil to import some 1. 5 billion litres of maize (corn) ethanol from the United states over the past 2 Â years.
an emeritus professor in the Department of Plant pathology at the University of Minnesota who retired in 2001 from the U s. Department of agriculture's Cereal Disease Lab (then the Cereal Rust Lab). Early in his career,
but only distantly related, fungi with multicellular dark spores that were causing disease in grains such as corn.
Leonard found E. rostratum on corn, sorghum and Johnsongrass fairly often, although it was not nearly as common as several more severe corn pathogens.
It was an opportunist and would sometimes infect ears and stalks when insects drilled into the plant,
China sacks officials over Golden Rice controversychina has sacked three officials for breaching Chinese laws and ethical regulations during a trial in
which children were fed genetically modified rice. The trial s legitimacy was questioned in August by the environmental group Greenpeace.
The genetically modified rice strain at the centre of the controversy is engineered to produce à Â-carotene, a precursor of Vitamin a, with the aim of fighting Vitamin a deficiency in developing countries.
It has been dubbed Golden Rice because of its bright yellow colour. The trial was designed to test how efficiently the à Â-carotene is converted to the vitamin once ingested.
each group of two dozen or so children aged six to eight ate meals containing Golden Rice, spinach or à Â-carotene capsules for lunch every week day during the three-week trial1.
But none of the children, their parents or school teachers was aware that Golden Rice was involved
The informed-consent form said that the rice contained à Â-carotene, but not that it was modified genetically
or that it was Golden Rice. Nor did it highlight uncertainty around any potential risks of ingesting such rice.
The CCTV programme disclosed an email sent by Yin to Tang in which the CDC official said that he had changed the wording to avoid mentioning Golden Rice
because it was"too sensitive. Moreover, Wang didn t apply for ethical evaluation of the trial
And Tang brought Golden Rice from the United states to China illegally, without due declaration to the relevant Chinese authorities,
The incident has outraged the families of children who ate the Golden Rice. Some have refused to accept the 80,000-yuan compensation
and have demanded a guarantee that the rice will not affect their children s health.""If it s safe, why did need they to deceive us into this?
The development of genetically modified rice enjoys strong government support in China, but the public remains sceptical about its safety.
For instance, the CDC's investigation revealed that the children ate Golden Rice just once during the study
and not  lunch every day during the three-week study as the paper states Â."How much Golden Rice did the children have exactly?
has rejected the findings of a controversial paper published in September (see go. nature. com/3slkys) claiming that rats fed genetically modified maize (corn) showed adverse health effects,
As such, a polycrystal made of nanotwin domains is a bit like a slab of plywood where the wood grain reverses direction in each successive layer.
MON Â 810, an insect-resistant maize (corn; and Amflora, a starchy potato used in the paper industry.
Similarly, nitrogen uptake by rice wheat and maize (corn) on long-term unfertilized farmland had increased by about 16%in the same period."
"This is the first major analysis of nitrogen deposition in China, says Mark Sutton, an environmental scientist at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Edinburgh, UK."
but bypassed the company by purchasing seed for a late-season crop from a grain elevator known to contain Monsanto s transgenic seed.
The researchers trained two sets of monkeys to eat maize (corn) dyed one of those two colours
They are applied to crop seeds such as maize (corn) and soya beans, and permeate the plants, protecting them from insect pests.
which threaten large swaths of the island s rice production and could thrust more than 10 Â million residents into hunger.
Monsanto will gain access to some Dupont patents covering disease resistance and maize (corn) defoliation.
Indiana farmer Vernon Bowman argued that Monsanto s patents did not apply to seeds he purchased from a grain elevator (storage tower) that contained a mixture of surplus crops,
Goulson's review also cites earlier studies suggesting that grain-eating birds such as partridges may be dying after eating as few as five seeds treated with neonicotinoids.
Neither cereals nor breast milk contain much Vitamin d and fruit contains none. Sixteenth-century thinking also dictated that infants be swaddled heavily.
The European Food safety Authority in Parma, Italy, concluded in May that maize (corn) seeds treated with fipronil pose a high acute risk to honeybees. ips trial approved On 19 july, Japan s health minister,
that it is withdrawing all pending EU applications for new transgenic maize (corn), soya beans and sugar beet.
Four crops in limbo three varieties of maize (corn) and one of soya bean are Monsanto products.
says Susan Mccouch, a rice geneticist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New york. To prioritize species for conservation,
and that habitat destruction threatens wild maize (corn) in Mexico. Dulloo adds that complementary efforts to conserve the plants within their native habitats should also be pursued to allow crop wild relatives to continue evolving
Hunt for mystery GM wheat hots upit has been nearly three months since an Oregon farmer discovered unapproved transgenic wheat in a commercial wheat field,
triggering bans on imports of US wheat into Japan and South korea. The harvest season has begun now,
and with the contamination proving to be isolated an event, imports into South korea have resumed. But as an army of combines marches across the wheat fields of eastern Oregon, the mystery of the transgenic intruders is fresh in the minds of investigators at the US Department of agriculture (USDA),
who are trying to trace the plants provenance to a particular research plot. Those close to the investigation say that the identity of the variety in question could emerge in the coming weeks,
Within a month of the discovery in May, USDA scientists had traced the origin of the plants to a line of herbicide-resistant Roundup Ready wheat called MON71800,
Monsanto killed the project in 2005 over farmers worries that overseas customers would not buy US wheat if it contained transgenic varieties.
No GM wheat has yet been approved to be grown commercially in the United states. The company says that all seed from the field trials conducted on more than 400 hectares in 16 states (see Sifting for GM wheat) was accounted for and either secured or destroyed.
Now, the USDA investigators are sifting through hundreds of markers to try to match the genetic signature of the contaminant Oregon wheat with one of the varieties from the 256 field tests registered with the USDA.
or variations in the number of copies of a repeated sequence that are unique to the various strains of wheat."
He says that any saboteur would have been taking a gamble that the GM wheat would be found.
because the farmer had sprayed a non-GM wheat field with glyphosate (the herbicide to which the GM wheat is resistant) in preparation for a new crop,
noticed a few remaining wheat plants and notified others of the discovery. Fraley argues that the distribution of the contaminant plants suggests that a human hand cast them there.
They were found in localized patches in only one of two wheat fields that had been planted with the same non-GM seed.
But Robert Zemetra, a wheat breeder at Oregon State university (OSU) in Corvallis, says there could be other explanations for such a distribution.
If, for example, the contaminant was a spring wheat plant in a winter wheat field, the transgenic wheat would flower
and drop most of its seeds before the rest of the crop was harvested. Those seeds would fall straight down,
generating a clump of herbicide-resistant offspring. No explanation is completely satisfying, acknowledges Rene Van Acker, a weed scientist at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada.
Van Acker and Zemetra carried out separate field trials of the wheat over a decade ago
ethanol from maize (corn) the main biofuel for US vehicles was given the green light under the agency s rules.
the number of corn crops and cattle fields which currently account for the majority of water usage in the US are expected to multiply well into 2040.
they compared those results with data on corn and cattle production collected annually by the US Department of agriculture.
they are also dedicating more and more land to corn and cattle. Because corn is a highly water-intensive crop,
and cattle feed extensively on corn, raising both in this region puts the aquifer at risk of depletion.
Americans and Europeans did not begin farming in the Great plains until the 1890s, when rising land prices, coupled with fears of food shortages
Instead, those early farmers used deep plowing, a practice that enabled grain roots to tap the moisture in the soil,
farmers returned to the land to grow corn and wheat using the aquifer s seemingly endless water supply.
Sixty years later that supply is in jeopardy, says Cornell University professor of crop and soil sciences Harold Mathijs van Es,
that it would not regulate a herbicide-tolerant maize (corn) made using zinc-finger nucleases.
Genetically modified crops pass benefits to weedsa genetic-modification technique used widely to make crops herbicide resistant has been shown to confer advantages on a weedy form of rice, even in the absence of the herbicide.
it shows that a weedy form of the common rice crop, Oryza sativa, gets a significant fitness boost from glyphosate resistance,
Lu and his colleagues genetically modified the cultivated rice species to overexpress its own EPSP synthase and crossbred the modified rice with a weedy relative.
Making weedy rice more competitive could exacerbate the problems it causes for farmers around the world
"If the EPSP-synthase gene gets into the wild rice species, their genetic diversity, which is really important to conserve,
GM rice row Protesters uprooted a field of genetically modified (GM) golden rice at a Philippines Department of agriculture compound in Camarines Sur on 8 Â August,
The nonprofit International Rice Research Institute, which was helping to conduct safety trials on the rice,
vowed to continue its experiments. Landsat woes The future of Landsat the world s longest-running series of Earth-observing satellites, is in jeopardy,
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011