tagged w/ Genetics
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thttp://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/02/fish-toxins-environment/
Some fish in New York’s Hudson River have become resistant to several of the waterway’s more toxic pollutants. Instead of getting sick from dioxins and related compounds including some polychlorinated biphenyls, Atlantic tomcod harmlessly store these poisons in fat, a new study finds.
But what’s good for this bottom-dwelling species could be bad for those feeding on it, says Isaac Wirgin of the New York University School of Medicine’s Institute of Environmental Medicine in Tuxedo. Each bite of tomcod that a predator takes, he explains, will move a potent dose of toxic chemicals up the food chain — eventually into species that could end up on home dinner tables.
From 1947 to 1976, two General Electric manufacturing plants along the Hudson River produced PCBs for a range of uses, including as insulating fluids in electrical transformers. Over the years, PCB and dioxin levels in the livers of the Hudson’s tomcod rose to become “among the highest known in nature,” Wirgin and his colleagues note online Feb. 17 in Science. Because these fish don’t detoxify PCBs, Wirgin explains, it was a surprise that they could accumulate such hefty contamination without becoming poisoned. His team now reports that the tomcod’s protection traces to a single mutation in one gene. The gene is responsible for producing a protein needed to unleash the pollutants’ toxicity.
All vertebrates contain molecules in their cells that will bind to dioxins and related compounds. Indeed, these proteins — aryl hydrocarbon receptors, or AHRs — are often referred to as dioxin receptors. Once these poisons diffuse into an exposed cell, each molecule can mate with a receptor and together they eventually pick up a third molecule. This trio can then dock with select segments of DNA in the cell’s nucleus to inappropriately turn on genes that can poison the host animal.
The tomcod actually has two types of AHRs, with AHR-2 offering the most effective binding to dioxin-like pollutants. But one naturally occurring AHR-2 variant, the result of a gene mutation, proves a very poor mate, Wirgin’s team has found. It takes five times more of the pollutants to get substantial binding than is needed with the conventional AHR-2.
In local rivers relatively free of dioxins and PCBs, 95 percent of tomcod possess AHR-2 only in the conventional form. But in the PCB-rich Hudson, Wirgin’s group finds, the only kind of AHR-2 protein in 99 percent of tomcod is the poorly binding variant.
The mutant receptor appears to have evolved long ago and to be widely dispersed. But in the Hudson, fish with the gene to make the mutant receptor have thrived, while those without it have died out, Wirgin notes.
Adaptation to resist poisons occurs throughout biology, observes molecular toxicologist John Stegeman of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. This process explains why some pesticides no longer kill their targets and why some microbes become immune to antibiotics.
Stegeman has been chronicling resistance to toxic PCBs and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in another coastal species, a killifish. “But the mechanism in the killifish has not been uncovered, despite a long effort to determine it,” he says.
Knowing the genetic underpinnings for chemical resistance can help predict the likelihood of that resistance developing, he explains, and can point to “how one might exploit resistance — even understand why chemicals are toxic.” Genetic mechanisms for chemical resistance in wild species are known for some invertebrates, such as bugs. Stegeman says, to his knowledge, this tomcod finding is the first in a vertebrate.thttp://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/02/fish-toxins-environment/
Some fish in... more
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Perhaps one of the most significant points in this case is that genetically engineered (GE) alfalfa is the first perennial GMO. It can cross breed with wild alfalfa and provide a rogue GE gene pool, greatly increasing the probability that eventually all alfalfa will become contaminated. Alfalfa is also considered “insectary” due to the large number of insects it attracts, which will also accelerate the genetic contamination. If GMO alfalfa follows the same path as GMO soy and corn, then within 15 years we should expect to see 80-90% of the 21 million acres currently planted in alfalfa to be of a GE variety. This means a serious challenge to producing organic alfalfa, vital for organic dairy. It also means a substantially increased environmental human exposure to the herbicide RoundUp, a known endocrine disrupter.
Plant pathologist Don Huber, PhD, professor emeritus of Purdue University, says the repercussions of introducing Roundup Ready technology to another crop, like alfalfa, could be disastrous. "If indications hold true, we're set up for the greatest disaster that this country or the world has ever seen, that will dwarf any major famine or drought that has ever been recorded," says Huber.
Should consumers choose to take their own action against this assault on human health, we wanted to point out some of the Land O’ Lakes brand names & licensees so that you can contact them and tell them what you think about their grand “little” experiment on mankind. Here are a few of the most well known names:
Land O’ Lakes
- http://www.landolakesinc.com/utility/contact/default.aspx
- http://www.facebook.com/LandOLakes
- (800) 328-9680
Purina Mills (Livestock feeds)
- http://cattle.purinamills.com/ContactUs/default.aspx
- (800) 227-8941
Dean Foods (Owner of Horizon Organics) packaging LOL products under license
- (214) 303-3400
- Dean Foods Consumer Response P.O. Box 961447 El Paso, TX 79996
- media@deanfoods.com
White Wave (Owned by Dean foods) packaging LOL products under license
- Land O’Lakes products: 800-878-9762
- jarod.ballentine@whitewave.com
- http://www.facebook.com/pages/WhiteWave-Foods/108451807072
Alpine Lace (Lowfat cheese products)
- http://www.alpinelace.com/contact/other.cfm
Of course you could also contact Forage Genetics directly at:
- Forage Genetics International, P.O. Box 339 Nampa, ID 83653-0339
- (800) 635-5701 info@foragegenetics.com
- Mark McCaslin, PhD, President - mccaslin@foragegenetics.com
If consumers let these food giants know that they will NOT buy their poisons, they WILL have no choice but to eventually listen
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Time for a massive boycott.Perhaps one of the most significant points in this case is that genetically engineered... more
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The latest development in the Gulf is how an incomprehensible bacterium is remarkably eating up the methane gas. It appears that engineered designer genes have also been used to remove the gas just as they have been used to consume the oil. The common denominator is that neither of these microbes are natural microorganisms. This should come as no surprise.
Microbiologist David Valentine at the University of California at Santa Barbara stated,
“Within a matter of months, the bacteria completely removed that methane. The bacteria kicked on more effectively than we expected.”
It sounds to me that this created synthetic genome microbe far exceeded the engineering and programming expectations.
According to a Fox Business report,
“This discovery offered a rare glimpse into the remarkable abilities of an obscure family of microbes in the depths of the Gulf”.
I agree. It is scientifically incomprehensible that any natural microorganism could do this and synthetically engineered microbes are definitely obscure by comparison.
University of Georgia microbiologist Samantha Joye, who has been independently analyzing methane from the Gulf of Mexico, also agrees with me. She said,
“It would take a superhuman microbe to do what they are claiming.”
So it has, Samantha. It was specifically engineered and its “superhuman” genetics were created synthetically.
In a January 7, 2011 article, the UK Register wrote how the scientists were particularly
“surprised at the speed with which the bacteria consumed their enormous meal”.
They also brought up the fact that earlier studies elsewhere in the world suggested methane levels around Deepwater Horizon would be well above normal for years ahead. It’s remarkable what highly engineered designer genes can do.
On January 6, 2011, the Christian Science Monitor reported how the study’s leaders boldly stated that rates of methane decomposition after the Gulf oil spill
“were faster than had ever been recorded in any other place on the planet.”
That’s because these are not natural microbes. You can’t compare apples to grapefruit.
TRACE ELEMENTS ADDED TO THE GULF
In the same CS Monitor report, University of Georgia microbiologist Samantha Joye stated how
“[The Gulf] is not well stocked with trace elements the bacteria need to survive – among them, copper, which bacteria specifically use to deal with the methane. Shortages of copper, as well as other trace elements, likely would have slammed the brakes on the exponential growth in bacterial populations needed to get rid of the methane in fewer than four months.”
The same applies to hydrocarbon-eating bacteria that consume oil, except that iron is needed more than the other trace elements. Since copper and iron are not prevalent mineral elements normally found in the Gulf of Mexico, the synthetic bacterium eating both the oil and the methane would not be able to do so at the remarkable speed they have without such essential earth elements. The only possible way these synthetic bacterium could have done this is by adding the required elements to the Gulf. Spraying a highly dissolved or colloidal mixture of trace elements onto and into the Gulf of Mexico would be absolutely required to accomplish this.
In our October 21, 2010 research article The Gulf BLUE PLAGUE (BP): It’s Not Wise To Fool Mother Nature, we had revealed the abnormally high amounts of elements found in the Gulf and that it was being sprayed along with or separately from the oil dispersants. In August 2010, rain water samples were tested by the Coastal Heritage Society of Louisiana where rain coming directly from the Gulf had unusually high concentrations of iron, copper, nickel, aluminum, manganese, and arsenic.
Without a doubt, the synthetically created bacterium introduced into the Gulf of Mexico to consume the oil and gasses were – and continue to be – fed these essential trace elements. Otherwise, they could not have thrived or reproduced at the accelerated rate they have. The continued spraying in the Gulf by aircraft and by boat is not Corexit or other oil dispersal chemicals. Consider the current spraying to have the same effect of adding liquid fertilizer to your crops.
SYNTHETIC MICROBES MUTATING NATURAL MICROORGANISMS
In early December, 2010 the research vessel WeatherBird II, owned by the University of Southern Florida (USF), went back to the Gulf of Mexico for follow-up water and core samples. As reported by Naomi Klein on January 13, 2011 in Hunting the Ocean for BP’s Missing Millions of Barrels of Oil,
“…these veteran scientists have seen things that they describe as unprecedented …evidence of bizarre sickness in the phytoplankton and bacterial communities…”
This “bizarre sickness” in the indigenous Gulf microorganisms is the direct result of the synthetic microbes that are still creating genetic sicknesses by mutating the DNA of the natural microbes. We had alerted our readers to this in DNA Mutations Confirmed in Gulf of Mexico on September 28, 2010 when we stated,
“DNA mutations are occurring within the Gulf of Mexico at a microscopic cellular level. The obvious effect this has on marine life as well as humans is a Pandora Box of unknowns.”
Tampa Bay Online gave further insight to this in an interview with Dr. John Paul, an oceanography biology professor at USF, regarding the oil plume they had discovered 40 miles off the Florida Panhandle:
It was found to be toxic to microscopic sea organisms, causing mutations to their DNA. If this plankton at the base of the marine food chain is contaminated, it could affect the whole ecosystem of the Gulf.
“The problem with mutant DNA is that it can be passed on and we don’t how this will affect fish or other marine life,” he says, adding that the effects could last for decades.
In Naomi Klein’s article, she describes how Paul introduced healthy bacteria and phytoplankton to Gulf water samples and what happened shocked him. The responses of the organisms “were genotoxic or mutagenic”. According to Paul, what was so “scary” about these results is that such genetic damage was “heritable,” meaning the mutations can be passed on.
Genotoxins pass on genetic changes to successors who have never been exposed to the original gene. Healthy microorganisms are then genetically changed and will pass on their DNA mutations to their descendants. This is a genetic chain-reaction as each mutated microbe interacts with and affects other microorganisms, especially with regards to the food chain:
“…the phytoplankton, the bacteria, and the [microorganisms] that graze on them – the zooplankton – seem to be the most potentially impacted.” – Dr. David Hollander, USF Marine Geochemist: December 6, 2010: Video interview on WeatherBird II.The latest development in the Gulf is how an incomprehensible bacterium is remarkably... more
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Nov 25 - Chinese scientists are cloning cashmere goats to boost the luxury-garment industry. The animals carry a gene to produce high quality cashmere, sought after around the world for use in expensive shawls and sweaters. Rob Muir reports.Nov 25 - Chinese scientists are cloning cashmere goats to boost the luxury-garment... more
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The former United States ambassador to France suggested "moving to retaliation" against France and the European Union (EU) in late 2007 to fight a French ban on Monsanto's genetically modified (GM) corn and changes in European policy toward biotech crops, according to a cable released by WikiLeaks on Sunday.
Former Ambassador Craig Stapleton was concerned about France's decision to suspend cultivation of Monsanto's MON-810 corn and warned that a new French environmental review standard could spread anti-biotech policy across the EU.
"Country team Paris recommends that we calibrate a target retaliation list that causes some pain across the EU since this is a collective responsibility, but that also focuses in part on the worst culprits," Stapleton wrote to diplomatic colleagues.
President George W. Bush appointed Stapleton as ambassador to France in 2005, and in 2009, Stapleton left the office and became an owner of the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team. Bush and Stapleton co-owned the Texas Rangers during the 1990s.
Monsanto is based in St. Louis.
The EU's 1998 approval of MON-810 corn has since expired. In recent years, several European countries joined France in banning MON-810 and similar biotech crops while the products are reassessed in light of research showing they could harm the environment and human health.
It is not clear if Stapleton's retaliation scheme was ever implemented.
"In our view, Europe is moving backwards not forwards on this issue with France playing a leading role, along with Austria, Italy and even the Commission ... Moving to retaliation will make clear that the current path has real costs to EU interests and could help strengthen European pro-biotech voices," Stapleton wrote.
MON-810 is engineered to excrete the Bt toxin, which is poisonous to some insect pests. A stacked version of MON-810 is also engineered to be resistant to glyphosate, a herbicide first popularized by Monsanto under the brand name Roundup.
The debate in France over Monsanto's GM products has grown ugly in recent years.
A recent Truthout report detailed the story of Dr. Gilles-Eric Seralini, a scientist at the University of Caen in France. Seralini's supporters claim the scientist has faced intimidation from within the French scientific community after he published several studies showing Monsanto GM corn and glyphosate posed risks to human health.The former United States ambassador to France suggested "moving to... more
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A middle-aged woman known as SM blithely reaches for poisonous snakes, giggles in haunted houses and once, upon escaping the clutches of a knife-wielding man, didn’t run but calmly walked away. A rare kind of brain damage precludes her from experiencing fear of any sort, finds a study published online December 16 in Current Biology.
link: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/12/fear-brain-amygdala/A middle-aged woman known as SM blithely reaches for poisonous snakes, giggles in... more
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Liberals may owe their political outlook partly to their genetic make-up, according to new research from the University of California, San Diego, and Harvard University. Ideology is affected not just by social factors, but also by a dopamine receptor gene called DRD4. The study's authors say this is the first research to identify a specific gene that predisposes people to certain political views.
Appearing in the latest edition of The Journal of Politics published by Cambridge University Press, the research focused on 2,000 subjects from The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. By matching genetic information with maps of the subjects' social networks, the researchers were able to show that people with a specific variant of the DRD4 gene were more likely to be liberal as adults, but only if they had an active social life in adolescence.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter affecting brain processes that control movement, emotional response, and ability to experience pleasure and pain. Previous research has identified a connection between a variant of this gene and novelty-seeking behavior, and this behavior has previously been associated with personality traits related to political liberalism.
Lead researcher James H. Fowler of UC San Diego and his colleagues hypothesized that people with the novelty-seeking gene variant would be more interested in learning about their friends' points of view. As a consequence, people with this genetic predisposition who have a greater-than-average number of friends would be exposed to a wider variety of social norms and lifestyles, which might make them more liberal than average. They reported that "it is the crucial interaction of two factors -- the genetic predisposition and the environmental condition of having many friends in adolescence -- that is associated with being more liberal." The research team also showed that this held true independent of ethnicity, culture, sex or age.
Fowler concludes that the social and institutional environment cannot entirely explain a person's political attitudes and beliefs and that the role of genes must be taken into account. "These findings suggest that political affiliation is not based solely on the kind of social environment people experience," said Fowler, professor of political science and medical genetics at UC San Diego.
"It is our hope that more scholars will begin to explore the potential interaction of biology and environment," he said. "The way forward is to look for replication in different populations and age groups."Liberals may owe their political outlook partly to their genetic make-up, according to... more
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Neandertal Genome Yields Evidence Of Interbreeding With Humans - Science News
Some people don’t just have a caveman mentality; they may actually carry a little relic of the Stone Age in their DNA.
A new study of the Neandertal genome shows that humans and Neandertals interbred. The discovery comes as a big surprise to researchers who have been searching for genetic evidence of human-Neandertal interbreeding for years and finding none.
About 1 percent to 4 percent of DNA in modern people from Europe and Asia was inherited from Neandertals, researchers report in the May 7 Science. “It’s a small, but very real proportion of our ancestry,” says study coauthor David Reich of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Mass. Comparisons of the human and Neandertal genomes are also revealing how humans evolved to become the sole living hominid species on the planet.
Neandertals lived in Europe, the Middle East and western Asia until they disappeared about 30,000 years ago. The new data indicate that humans may not have replaced Neandertals, but assimilated them into the human gene pool.
“Neandertals are not totally extinct; they live on in some of us,” says Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and leader of the Neandertal genome project.
He and other geneticists involved in the effort to compile the complete genetic instruction book of Neandertals didn’t expect to find that Neandertals had left a genetic legacy. Earlier analyses that looked at only a small part of the genome had contradicted the notion that humans and Neandertals intermixed (SN Online: 8/7/08).
“We as a consortium came into this with a very, very strong bias against gene flow,” Reich says. In fact, when he and his colleagues announced the completion of a rough draft of the Neandertal genome a year ago, the researchers said such genetic exchange was unlikely (SN: 3/14/09, p. 5).
But several independent lines of evidence now convince the researchers that humans and Neandertals did interbreed. “The breakthrough here is to show that it could happen and it did happen,” Pääbo says.
The result came as no surprise to some scientists, however. Archaeologists have described ancient skeletons from Europe that had characteristics of both early modern humans and Neandertals; evidence, the researchers say, of interbreeding between the two groups. But until the cataloging of the entire Neanderthal genome, genetic studies could find no evidence to support the idea.
“After all these years the geneticists are coming to the same conclusions that some of us in the field of archaeology and human paleontology have had for a long time,” says João Zilhão, an archaeologist and paleoanthropologist at the University of Bristol in England. “What can I say? If the geneticists come to this same conclusion, that’s to be expected.”
LINK - - - ( more,.....continues,.......e t c. ..........)
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/58936/title/Neandertal_genome_yields_evidence_of_interbreeding_with_humansNeandertal Genome Yields Evidence Of Interbreeding With Humans - Science News
Some... more
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One in 20 women starts their menopause before the age of 46 - which can affect their chances of conceiving even a decade earlier.
link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-11554958One in 20 women starts their menopause before the age of 46 - which can affect their... more
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Genes are apolitical, but society is not. To understand and respond as a society to individual genetic differences, we must understand the environment where these genes are expressedGenes are apolitical, but society is not. To understand and respond as a society to... more
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Where do you really come from? And how did you get to where you live today? DNA studies suggest that all humans today descend from a group of African ancestors who—about 60,000 years ago—began a remarkable journey.
The Genographic Project is seeking to chart new knowledge about the migratory history of the human species by using sophisticated laboratory and computer analysis of DNA contributed by hundreds of thousands of people from around the world. In this unprecedented and of real-time research effort, the Genographic Project is closing the gaps of what science knows today about humankind's ancient migration stories.
The Genographic Project is a five-year research partnership led by National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Dr. Spencer Wells. Dr. Wells and a team of renowned international scientists and IBM researchers, are using cutting-edge genetic and computational technologies to analyze historical patterns in DNA from participants around the world to better understand our human genetic roots. The three components of the project are: to gather field research data in collaboration with indigenous and traditional peoples around the world; to invite the general public to join the project by purchasing a Genographic Project Public Participation Kit; and to use proceeds from Genographic Public Participation Kit sales to further field research and the Genographic Legacy Fund which in turn supports indigenous conservation and revitalization projects. The Project is anonymous, non-medical, non-profit and all results will be placed in the public domain following scientific peer publication.
https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/index.htmlWhere do you really come from? And how did you get to where you live today? DNA... more
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(Audio-only Interview available at link)
Dr Roger Beachy is an expert on plant viruses and the biotechnology of plants. But if you recognise his name, a different phrase is likely to jump into your mind: genetically modified foods.
Two decades ago, his research - in collaboration with Monsanto - helped develop the world's first genetically modified crop (a tomato). In this week's show, Mike sits down with him to discuss his work and the world's attitudes to his creation.
Scientific ignorance is a major obstacle according to Dr Beachy, who argues the public's understanding of cutting edge science has deteriorated over the past 50 years - and this is leading to misunderstandings when it comes to GM crops. He also passionately urges nations to share their knowledge and research to help the world's growing population feed itself; with GM crops central to that goal.
Also in the show, we hear from another genetic engineer - but one with very different views to Dr Beachy. Dr Michael Antoniou uses the same methods for genetic engineering as those who produce GM crops, however, he focuses on producing GM bacteria to tackle viruses. He argues the methods used for genetic engineering are too crude when it comes altering the DNA sequence of plants.(Audio-only Interview available at link)
Dr Roger Beachy is an expert on plant... more
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It’s almost like stealing from Peter to pay Paul, but a recent study by researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory suggests that we could slow down or even halt the effects of global warming by creating genetically modified (GMO) trees. So if you hate global warming and you also hate the science behind GMOs, then this puts you in quite the uncomfortable corner of decision making.
The study, which was published in the October issue of BioScience (which, shockingly, we do not have a subscription to) concludes that by genetically altering trees and plants to process and sequester carbon dioxide differently, we could slow down or halt global warming.
The idea is basically this: if we were to genetically alter first plants and then, ultimately soil, to store carbon dioxide for longer while turning it into long-lived forms of carbon we could then create entire forests of these GMO plants and thus have an “organic enemy” against global warming and CO2 increases. For example, plants might be modified so that they send more carbon to their roots where it could potentially be converted into “soil carbon” and remain out of circulation for centuries. Additionally (and somewhat importantly given the pending global food shortage), plants could be engineered to grow better in marginal arable lands, which would then increase the amount of carbon that the plants suck from the air.
The paper’s authors (Crister Jansson, Stan D. Wullschleger, Udava C. Kalluri and Gerals A. Tuskan) certainly don’t suggest that a GMO forest is the only solution – or even a quick fix solution – to climate change. However, it does present an interesting question. Would opponents of GMO vegetation still be opposed to that vegetation if the end result were cleaner air and a safer planet? Is there a distinction between a genetically modified sugar beet and a genetically modified forest? One has people up in arms. The other may seem like a logical solution to a global pollution problem.It’s almost like stealing from Peter to pay Paul, but a recent study by... more
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Plant geneticist Pamela Ronald was just tagging along on a kayaking trip with a girlfriend when she met Raoul Adamchak 15 years ago. She spent her days in the lab, trying to figure out how to genetically engineer plants. He was an organic farmer--and genetically engineered crops cannot be organic. They fell in love and got married.
Despite the giant gap in the public mind between organic farming, which bans artificial pesticides and fertilizers, and gene modification, the couple was never exactly star-crossed. From the beginning, Ronald says, they shared this goal: figuring out how to grow crops in a way that could feed the Earth without destroying the environment. Shortly after she met Adamchak, Ronald began looking for a variety of rice that could resist the floods that annually destroy 4 million tons of crops in India and Bangladesh. She produced one, and in 2009 the rice was released to farmers.
Now Ronald, 49, and Adamchak, 55, have become proselytizers for the marriage of genetically modified foods and organic farming. Their goal: crops that limit the use of pesticides and fertilizers while delivering more food per acre planted. They wrote a book together, Tomorrow's Table. An opinion piece she wrote for the Boston Globe won a 2009 National Association of Science Writers prize. They give lectures. They are leading a chorus of young scientists and forward thinkers who see genetic modification not as a threat to sustainable farming but as a new way to make it better. They are not fans of corporate agriculture but think genetically modified organisms represent a missed opportunity to make things better.
These true believers come as a flood of new gene crops approaches. The European Union estimates the number of GM traits in crops will quadruple to 120 by 2015. Only half will be made by for-profit companies. Stewart Brand, one of the founders of the back-to-the-land movement, has been arguing fiercely that environmentalists need to drop their anti-GM stance. So has Karl Haro von Mogel, a 27-year-old plant sciences graduate student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, whose blog promotes the technology. "There's so much stuff going on that nobody even knows about," says Von Mogel. "There is this huge potential if we use the science to pursue those things that are possible."
Then there are farmers like Jose Baer, a California grower of organic walnuts. He knows that big companies will probably never want to make GM versions of a minor crop like walnuts, but he bemoans the fact that protecting his trees without pesticides is expensive (he uses pheromones to lure the insects into mating with everything but one another). Transgenic plants, engineered with an antipest gene, could kill the bugs. "I believe it's probably going to be a very valuable technology in the future," he says.
For Ronald the most powerful argument is that lives are at stake. A genetically engineered rice that contains vitamin A was created by academic researchers and the seed company Syngenta ( SYT - news - people ). It could save the lives of 40,000 children a year--more, if people don't reject it just because it's genetically modified. "Greenpeace is against that," she says. Why? "People just really cannot imagine their child dying from any kind of vitamin deficiency."
Most naysayers have little understanding of agricultural genetics, Ronald says, and are under the impression that the food they eat is far more natural than it really is.
"You can never develop anything with no risk," she says. "Every single thing you eat every day has been genetically manipulated, unless you're eating wild Alaskan salmon or Maine blueberries." Plant and animal breeding go back maybe 14,000 years.
Foods created through a process called mutagenesis, in which seeds are exposed to chemicals or radioactivity until their traits change, can be certified organic, Ronald says. Yet, as the National Academy of Sciences has noted, this method is far more unpredictable than inserting a single gene from another species, as was done to produce insect-resistant corn, soybeans and cotton.
Ronald's flood-resistant rice is also certified organic through another loophole. The gene that lets the rice plant survive after being submerged in water comes from an archaic rice strain from before the dawn of agriculture, discovered by geneticists 50 years ago. Initially she inserted the gene using bacteria, but then her colleagues managed to breed the ancient rice with modern varieties using genetics-assisted breeding technologies, which transferred the flood-resistance gene and not much else. That meant fewer regulatory hurdles.
Ronald says that genetically modified crops have proved remarkably safe for both people and the environment. When genetically modified corn not made for human consumption got into the food supply in 2001, there were many reports of allergies. But the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention found that none of them panned out. Insect-resistant corn containing the bt toxin, derived from a bacterium and used in organic farming, does kill butterflies and other good insects but far less than 1% of them. Traditional pesticides kill them all. A row of bt cotton has more diversity in insect species than the regular stuff. Besides, pesticides kill people, too: 300,000 a year, most of them impoverished farm workers.
In the eyes of these revisionist enviros, even Monsanto ( MON - news - people )'s Roundup Ready crops, which are genetically modified to be resistant to the company's herbicide, have a good side. Roundup is not as toxic to animals or people as other herbicides, and the crops have allowed farmers to do less tilling. That means fewer tractors and the carbon-sparing equivalent of taking 6 million cars off the road.
Adamchak emphasizes that genetically modified crops can't overcome the lack of biodiversity in the farm system. But with organic farming representing 3% of U.S. crop production, there is certainly room for GM crops to help.Plant geneticist Pamela Ronald was just tagging along on a kayaking trip with a... more
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Genetically modified corn produced by Monsanto Co. and DuPont Co. has slashed populations of a crop-eating pest in the Midwest, and most of the estimated $6.9 billion net benefit has accrued to conventional crops, a study found.
Adoption of corn engineered to produce the insecticidal protein Bt has cut populations of the European corn borer across the Midwest since 1996, according to research published Thursday in the journal Science. Declines range from 27% in Wisconsin to 73% in Minnesota, the research showed.
Farmers in Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and Nebraska have realized a $6.9 billion net benefit over 14 years because of reduced corn-borer damage, according to the study. About 63% of the gain went to conventional corn acres, which enjoy less insect pressure without paying for costlier modified seeds.
'Wow factor'
"That's sort of the wow factor," Bill Hutchison, the head of entomology at the University of Minnesota and lead author of the study, said. "We didn't realize until we started really adding it up over 14 years that two-thirds of the benefit is on the non-Bt corn acres."
In Wisconsin, 75% of the $325 million cumulative economic benefit linked to Bt corn's pest suppression between 1996-2009 went to non-Bt corn growers. Wisconsin has about 3.9 million corn acres, with about half in Bt corn.
"This study is the first to estimate the value of area-wide pest suppression from transgenic crops and the subsequent benefit to growers of non-transgenic crops," said co-author Paul Mitchell, a University of Wisconsin-Madison agricultural economist who conducted the economic analysis for the study.
Farmers who plant Bt corn are required by regulators to plant at least 20% of their crop with conventional seed to prevent bugs from developing pesticide resistance, a program that has so far been successful, Hutchison said. Because Bt corn farmers must also plant conventional corn, they share in the residual impact of nearby Bt corn plantings, as do organic farmers and others who sow conventional grains, he said.
About 63% of the U.S. corn crop is modified to produce Bt, the insect-killing protein derived from Bacillus thuringiensis, a soil bacterium. The corn borer, a caterpillar that metamorphoses into a moth, was accidentally introduced to the U.S. in 1917.
"Farmers are asking, 'If populations are low, do I still need to pay for this Bt technology?' " Hutchison said. "Our models also show that if they just stopped planting Bt corn, in about four to five years, the corn borers probably would come back."
Two of the 15 researchers in the study are employed by Syngenta AG and Dow Chemical Co., both of which produce Bt corn.
http://www.worldcommunitycookbook.org/season/guide/photos/corn.jpgGenetically modified corn produced by Monsanto Co. and DuPont Co. has slashed... more
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An international team of researchers charted the one billion year evolutionary course that a protein family followed, finding that today's novelty and complexity came about through many small changesAn international team of researchers charted the one billion year evolutionary course... more
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Scientists at Kew's Jodrell Laboratory have discovered that Paris japonica, a striking rare native of Japan(1), has the largest genome(2) of them all -- bigger than the human genome and even larger than the previous record holder -- the marbled lungfish.
The results are published in the Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society. The diversity of genome sizes (the amount of DNA) in plants and animals has fascinated but at the same time puzzled scientists since this variation was first detected in the early 20th century. How and why such diversity evolved are important unanswered questions because we know that it has biological and ecological consequences that affect the distribution and persistence of biodiversity.
There is a staggering diversity of genome sizes. The smallest genome (3) so far reported (0.0023 pg of DNA) is found in a parasite (Encephalitozoon intestinalis) of humans and other mammals. The human genome, at 3.0 pg, is 1300 times larger than this, but this pales into insignificance compared to those found in some animals and plants.
Among animals, some amphibians have enormous genomes, but the largest recorded so far is that of the marbled lung fish (Protopterus aethiopicus) with 132.83 pg(3) . Among plants, the record holder for 34 years was a species of fritillary(4) (Fritillaria assyriaca) until earlier this year when a Dutch group knocked the fritillary off the top spot when they found that a natural hybrid of trillium (Trillium × hagae), related to herb paris had a genome just 4% larger than the fritillary (132.50 pg).
This was widely thought to be approaching the maximum size that a genome could reach, until this summer when a team of Kew scientists discovered that the genome of another close relative of herb paris, Paris japonica from Japan, is a staggering 15% bigger than the genome of either the trillium or the fish at a whopping 152.23 pg
Ilia Leitch, Research Scientist in the Jodrell Laboratory, says "We were astounded when we discovered that this small stunning plant had such a large genome -- it's so large that when stretched out it would be taller than Big Ben.
"Some people may wonder what the consequences are of such a large genome and whether it really matters if one organism has more DNA than another. The answer to this is a resounding "yes, it does," and the consequences operate at all levels from the cell up to the whole organism and beyond. In plants, research has demonstrated that those with large genomes are at greater risk of extinction, are less adapted to living in polluted soils and are less able to tolerate extreme environmental conditions -- all highly relevant in today's changing world."
Another example of the significance and importance of genome size in both animals and plants, is the fact that the more DNA there is in a genome, the longer it takes for a cell to copy all its DNA and divide. The knock-on effect of this is that it can take longer for an organism with a larger genome to complete its life cycle than one with a small genome. It is no coincidence that many plants living in deserts which must grow quickly after rains have small genomes enabling them to grow rapidly. In contrast, species with large genomes grow much more slowly and are excluded from such habitats.
Genome size is also positively correlated with nuclear size (the more DNA you have the more space you need for it), and, in many cases, also with cell size which can have knock-on consequences at the whole organism level.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101007120641.htmScientists at Kew's Jodrell Laboratory have discovered that Paris japonica, a... more
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Researchers announce they found a fossil virus hiding in the most unexpected place: the chromosomes of several songbird species. This ancient virus resembles human hepatitis B virus. Finding this ancient virus will catalyse new lines of inquiry that may help scientists predict and prevent future human viral pandemics that originate in birds.Researchers announce they found a fossil virus hiding in the most unexpected place:... more
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