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63 year old stroke victim was greatly improved through stem cell therapy – Video


63 year old stroke victim was greatly improved through stem cell therapy

By: Gkhan Akdo #287;an

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Foreign doctors behind illegal stem cell therapy – Video


Foreign doctors behind illegal stem cell therapy
The Philippine Medical Association wants to go after foreign doctors who are reportedly conducting unauthorized stem cell procedures in the country.

By: TheABSCBNNews

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Paralyzed German Shepard Receives Revolutionary Stem Cell Therapy! – Video


Paralyzed German Shepard Receives Revolutionary Stem Cell Therapy!

By: Stemlogix, LLC

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Giving hope: The promise of stem cell therapy

MANILA - As stem cell treatment begins to gain traction among Filipinos, a surgeon believes the country is now entering a new phase in medicine.

Dr. Levi John Lansangan, one of the founding members of the Philippine Stem Cell Society, said there is much promise in stem cell therapy because of the hope it gives to ailing patients.

"Before it was only physiologic, then it became pathologic, which deals with diseases. Then it became pharmacologic, wherein we give medicine. But now it is regenerative, wherein the body heals by itself," Lansangan told ANC's "Prime Time" on Wednesday.

Stem cell treatment involves harvesting stem cells, processing them, and injecting them back to the body.

Lansangan said the autologous treatment, which harvests stem cells from the patients own system, is the safest type of stem cell procedure.

The procedure may last for up to 4 hours, depending on the patients health. It may cost up to P1.6 million.

Stem cell treatment is believed to have the potential to cure illnesses including diabetes, heart ailments, brain damage such as Parkinsons and Alzheimers, osteoarthritis, stroke, baldness and even sports injuries.

The hardest thing to say to a patient is hopelessness. If you say there is no hope for the disease, it is very unacceptable for the patient. But with stem cell, were giving hope. Not hope in the sense that we are just giving placebo but hope that there is really something into it thats really big, Lansangan said.

But Lansangan warned that there are also risks involved in the process, particularly if stem cells are derived from animals such as rabbits and black sheep.

There are a lot of sources for stem cell. But the only stem cell sources approved by the DOH [Department of Health] come from the bone marrow, fats and blood of the patient itself. We dont recognize xenograph, or from animals. That is where the problem lies, he said.

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FDA urges hotels to guard vs stem cell therapy

By: Jet Villa, InterAksyon.com June 29, 2013 6:55 PM

A scientist working on stem cells in a laboratory. AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

InterAksyon.com The online news portal of TV5

MANILA, Philippines -- The Food and Drug Administration has asked hotels to guard against allowing stem cell therapy to be performed in their premises.

FDA acting director Dr. Kenneth Hartigan-Go said hotels may be held liable for guests found performing or undergoing stem cell therapy in their rooms.

Go pointed out that performing medical procedures like stem cell therapy in a non-health facility is illegal.

Under Republic Act 9711 or the Food and Drug Administration Act of 2009, violators face a fine of up to P500,000 plus closure of the establishment and jail terms.

In FDA Advisory 2013-012 issued May 15, the agency warned the pubic against "receiving unapproved stem cell preparations in non-health facilities."

"Patients who might receive stem cell preparations and therapy without prior FDA-Department of Health approval run the risks of contracting infectious diseases and severe complications which may lead to permanent disabilities, physical deformities, serious iatrogenic harm, autoimmune diseases and worst death, and without the benefit of health insurance coverage," the advisory said.

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Palace warns public on stem cell therapy

MALACAANG warned Friday the public from seeking stem cell therapy following the complaint by a government official of feeling weaker after undergoing this kind of treatment.

In a press briefing, deputy presidential spokesperson Abigail Valte said that the Department of Health (DOH) will issue an administrative order regarding the stem cell treatments in the country.

"The DOH received several reports regarding the stand-alone clinics which are offering (stem cell therapies) for skin rejuvenation to make you look younger. That's why the DOH has already acted on it. It just happened that there was an incident that was highlighted," she said.

Dangerous Drugs Board chairman Antonio Villar has admitted of undergoing recently stem cell therapy in an upscale hotel in Makati City in the hope to cure bone pains. He claimed of spending around P900,000 for the treatment. But he said he only felt weaker after the therapy.

Valte said that the public should be aware that stem cell therapies are only being undertaken in the DOH-accredited hospitals and not in any hotel or stand-alone clinics.

She also said that those being accredited are the hospitals and not the doctors.

"Come August 31, hospitals should file their accreditation requirements for them to continue to offer this treatment, if they offer that (treatment). So there's an accreditation process," she explained.

Valte said that she was also told that stem cell treatment is geared toward a certain purpose and not "cure all" ailments.

There are also certain sources that are only allowed by the DOH, in particular, the Food and Drug Administration, she said.

The official also urged the public to inform the authorities of any establishments or medical practitioners who have been violating the law.

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Gov’t to tighten rules on stem cell therapy

By Michael Lim Ubac Philippine Daily Inquirer

Hospitals offering stem cell therapy have until Aug. 31 to seek or renew their accreditation from the Department of Health (DOH), a Palace official said Friday.

For the information of the public, the DOH is accrediting hospitals for this kind of treatment, and come Aug. 31, these hospitals should file their accreditation requirements (with DOH) for them to continue to offer this treatment, said deputy presidential spokesperson Abigail Valte.

The government is eyeing stricter regulation of hospitals offering stem cell therapy amid speculations that the recent deaths of three politicians were due to the xenogenic (animal-based stem cell) treatment they had received in Germany last year.

Dr. Leo Olarte, president of the Philippine Medical Association (PMA) and spokesperson of the Philippine Society for Stem Cell Medicine, said the groups were still trying to determine whether the politicians had died due to their illness or due to hypersensitivity reaction from the xenogenic stem cells.

Last week, the PMA also warned of a possible scam involving German doctors coming over to perform stem cell therapy on patients in five-star hotels at around P1 million per shot.

Valte echoed a similar warning from the DOH against doctors offering the procedure in their clinics, saying that hospitals, not (individual) doctors, nor stand-alone clinics, are the ones being accredited.

Not a cure all

The Palace official also cautioned the public against claims that stem cell therapy was a cure all (for diseases).

There is no treatment that will cure all of your ills. Much less your love problems, Valte said.

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2013 05 28 1 LS From Human Genome to Personalized Medicine the promise of science and the reality of – Video


2013 05 28 1 LS From Human Genome to Personalized Medicine the promise of science and the reality of

By: wwwwskru

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2013 05 28 1 LS From Human Genome to Personalized Medicine the promise of science and the reality of - Video

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UMB Panelists Present Personalized Medicine to Leadership Maryland visitors – Video


UMB Panelists Present Personalized Medicine to Leadership Maryland visitors
On April 11, 2013 visitors from Leadership Maryland received briefings on personalized medicine from faculty at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. Presen...

By: UnivMdBaltimore

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Project Walk Carlsbad – Leile M. Spinal Cord Injury Milestone – Video


Project Walk Carlsbad - Leile M. Spinal Cord Injury Milestone
Leila Murray has spina bifida and has been attending Project Walk since January 2013. She started with little control and stability in her legs along with no...

By: Project Walk

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Vlasto’s story – Spinal cord injury recovery – Video


Vlasto #39;s story - Spinal cord injury recovery
This is a story about my injury and recovery. I am a c4-c6 quadriplegic ASIA C. I live in jersey and don #39;t take no for an answer. Copyrights---- AFI- Prelude...

By: Vlasto Vrskovy

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Type 2 diabetes patients transplanted with own bone marrow stem cells reduces insulin use

Public release date: 28-Jun-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Robert Miranda cogcomm@aol.com Cell Transplantation Center of Excellence for Aging and Brain Repair

Putnam Valley, NY. (June 28 2013) A study carried out in India examining the safety and efficacy of self-donated (autologous), transplanted bone marrow stem cells in patients with type 2 diabetes (TD2M), has found that patients receiving the transplants, when compared to a control group of TD2M patients who did not receive transplantation, required less insulin post-transplantation.

The study appears as an early e-publication for the journal Cell Transplantation, and is now freely available on-line at http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/cog/ct/pre-prints/ct0920bhansali.

"There is growing interest in the scientific community for cellular therapies that use bone marrow-derived cells for the treatment of type 2 diabetes mellitus and its complications," said study corresponding author Anil Bhansali, PhD professor and head of the Endocrinology Department at the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education in Chandrigarh, India. "But the potential of stem cell therapy for this disease is yet to be fully explored."

While there is growing interest in using stem cell transplantation to treat TD2M, few studies have examined the utility of bone marrow-derived stem cells. By experimenting with bone marrow-derived stem cells, the researchers sought to exploit the rich source of stem cells in bone marrow.

Their study aimed at evaluating the efficacy and safety of autologous bone marrow-derived stem cell transplantation in patients with T2DM and who also had good glycemic control. Good glycemic control emerged as an important factor in the transplantation group and in the non-transplanted control group.

Cell transplantation had a significant impact on the patients in this study as those administered cells demonstrated a significant reduction in insulin requirement. A significantly smaller reduction in the insulin requirement of the control group was also observed but a "repeated emphasis on life style modification" was believed to be a contributing factor in this effect.

According to Dr. Bhansali, the strength of their study included the inclusion of a homogenous patient population with T2DM which exhibited good glycemic control, and the presence of a similar control group that did not get cell transplants.

"The efficacy and safety of stem cell therapy needs to be established in a greater number of patients and with a longer duration follow-up," concluded Bhansali and his co-authors. "The data available so far from animal and human studies is encouraging, however, it has enormous limitations."

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New Guiding Principles in Cancer Gene Research — Brad Cairns, PhD – Video


New Guiding Principles in Cancer Gene Research -- Brad Cairns, PhD
The discovery, by Bradley R. Cairns, PhD, Senior Director of Basic Science at Huntsman Cancer Institute and a professor in the Department of Oncological Scie...

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Gene clues show which children will grow out of asthma

A gene scorecard may one day help predict which youngsters are likely to grow out of childhood asthma and which will have the disease in adulthood, a study said on Thursday.

Asthma is one of the commonest disorders among children in developed countries and is spreading fast in emerging economies.

Roughly half of children with asthma will emerge from it by the time they become young adults -- but until now, no-one knows how to determine who will be the lucky ones.

The new research, published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine Journal, marks a first step towards a predictive test.

Researchers in the United States put together a risk score derived from 15 genetic variants that are closely associated with asthma.

They tested this model on data from a highly-regarded, long-running study in New Zealand, in which 880 people have been tracked for health since their birth 40 years ago.

Those whose DNA carried most risk variants were more than a third likelier to develop asthma earlier in life and to have asthma that persisted into adulthood than those at low genetic risk.

A higher score also meant they were likelier to be prone to asthma-related allergic reactions and impaired lung function. They were also likelier to miss school or work than counterparts with a lower genetic risk.

The test is an initial foray into a complex disease believed to have environmental and genetic factors, and for which more risk variants are likely to emerge.

It could unlock better understanding of the biology of asthma, notably how pollution and genes interact.

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Gene Discoveries Could Give Insight Into Migraines

TUESDAY, June 25 (HealthDay News) -- Five newly identified genetic regions linked to the onset of migraine could boost scientists' understanding of what drives the painful headaches, researchers say.

"This study has greatly advanced our biological insight about the cause of migraine," Dr. Aarno Palotie, from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the United Kingdom, said in an institute news release. Migraine is difficult to study, he added, because "between episodes the patient is basically healthy, so it's extremely difficult to uncover biochemical clues."

In their research, Palotie's team pinpointed five genetic regions tied to migraine. They did so after analyzing the results of 29 different genetic studies involving more than 100,000 samples from people with and without migraines.

Some of the five regions are close to a network of genes that are sensitive to oxidative stress, a biochemical process that leads to improper functioning of cells. The researchers believe that many of the genes in regions associated with migraine are interconnected and may be disrupting the internal regulation of tissue and cells in the brain, resulting in some of the symptoms of migraine.

The researchers also identified another 134 genetic regions that are possibly associated with migraine susceptibility.

Migraine affects about 14 percent of adults, and according to the researchers this was the largest study of migraine genetics to date.

"We would not have made discoveries by studying smaller groups of individuals," study co-author Dr. Gisela Terwindt, of Leiden University Medical Centre in the Netherlands, said in the news release. Having such a large study population "means we can tease out the genes that are important suspects and follow them up in the lab."

-- Robert Preidt

Copyright 2013 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

SOURCE: Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, news release, June 23, 2013

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Resistance gene found against Ug99 wheat stem rust pathogen

Public release date: 27-Jun-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Eduard Akhunov eakhunov@k-state.edu 785-532-1342 Kansas State University

MANHATTAN, Kan. -- The world's food supply got a little more plentiful thanks to a scientific breakthrough.

Eduard Akhunov, associate professor of plant pathology at Kansas State University, and his colleague, Jorge Dubcovsky from the University of California-Davis, led a research project that identified a gene that gives wheat plants resistance to one of the most deadly races of the wheat stem rust pathogen -- called Ug99 -- that was first discovered in Uganda in 1999. The discovery may help scientists develop new wheat varieties and strategies that protect the world's food crops against the wheat stem rust pathogen that is spreading from Africa to the breadbaskets of Asia and can cause significant crop losses.

Other Kansas State University researchers include Harold Trick, professor of plant pathology; Andres Salcedo, doctoral candidate in genetics; and Cyrille Saintenac, a postdoctoral research associate currently working at the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique in France. The project was funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Borlaug Global Rust Initiative.

The team's study, "Identification of Wheat Gene Sr35 that Confers Resistance to Ug99 Stem Rust Race Group," appears in the journal Science.

It identifies the stem rust resistance gene named Sr35, and appears alongside a study from an Australian group that identifies another effective resistance gene called Sr33.

"This gene, Sr35, functions as a key component of plants' immune system," Akhunov said. "It recognizes the invading pathogen and triggers a response in the plant to fight the disease."

Wheat stem rust is caused by a fungal pathogen. According to Akhunov, since the 1950s wheat breeders have been able to develop wheat varieties that are largely resistant to this pathogen. However, the emergence of strain Ug99 in Uganda in 1999 devastated crops and has spread to Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan and Yemen, though has yet to reach the U.S.

"Until that point, wheat breeders had two or three genes that were so efficient against stem rust for decades that this disease wasn't the biggest concern," Akhunov said. "However, the discovery of the Ug99 race of pathogen showed that changes in the virulence of existing pathogen races can become a huge problem."

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Gene discoveries may aid fight against wheat disease

Two genes that are resistant to fungal wheat disease may help ward off a growing epidemic of stem rust that threatens crops in Africa, the Middle East and beyond, researchers said Friday.

International scientists have spent years trying to pin down the sections of the wheat genome that are resistant to Ug99, a pathogen that was first found to be killing wheat crops in Uganda in the late 1990s and has since appeared in Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan, Yemen and Iran.

The last major outbreak of wheat stem rust in the 1950s was quelled two decades later with the introduction of a resistant strain of plants, a pioneering project by Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution.

Concerns resurfaced when the Ug99 pathogen appeared, packing the potential to infect 90 percent of the crop globally and risking unrest linked to shortages and high prices since wheat provides about 20 percent of the world's food.

Two genes -- Sr35 and Sr33 -- appear to confer resistance by acting as part of the plant's immune system and fighting off the deadly fungal disease.

"This is a very significant development," said Ronnie Coffman, international professor of plant breeding at Cornell University who was not involved in the two companion studies published in the US journal Science.

"It puts us in a position eventually to stack multiple genes, tightly linked, that will provide durable resistance against the pathogen," he told AFP.

The hunt for resistant genes has taken many years and was made harder by the complexity of the wheat genome, which has almost twice as much genetic information as the human genome, researchers said.

One of the resistant genes, Sr35, was identified in an ancient and rarely planted form of wheat known as einkorn, found in Turkey.

"Until now, however, we did not know what kind of gene confers resistance to Ug99 in this wheat accession," said researcher Eduard Akhunov, associate professor of plant pathology at Kansas State University.

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Matthew Liao – Engineer Humans to Stop Climate Change (Ideas at the House) – Video


Matthew Liao - Engineer Humans to Stop Climate Change (Ideas at the House)
The latest science suggests that it is too late to prevent human-induced climate change. Technological optimists are now turning their minds to mitigation th...

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Kim Knerl Speaks On Better Food


Kim Knerl Speaks On Better Food Better Ways Of Living
Kim starts speaking at 02:46 What did the more than 2 million people from 52 countries and 436 cities do on their March Against Monsanto, 25 May 2013? This, ...

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Walter Kloefkorn Speaks On Beyond Corporate Globalization – Video


Walter Kloefkorn Speaks On Beyond Corporate Globalization
Water starts speaking at 02:46 What did the more than 2 million people from 52 countries and 436 cities do on their March Against Monsanto, 25 May 2013? This...

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Artist Plays Detective: Can I Reconstruct A Face From A Piece Of Hair?

Her techniques aren't super-sophisticated. She's not a leader in the field. She's more or less an amateur. This is what you can do with ordinary genetic engineering tools right now. Artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg can find a cigarette lying on the sidewalk on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn, and working from traces of saliva, by pulling DNA out of those saliva cells and using a bunch of simple algorithms available online, she can make some very educated guesses about what the smoker might look like.

She thinks she's got a probable lead on not only gender, but on more subtle things: eye color, hair color, facial structure, skin tone. The bit of green chewing gum she found next to a bodega on Wilson Avenue ...

... "probably" (while the probabilities may vary with characteristics) belonged to a Latino man who looks like this ...

And, although this isn't fair because she already knows what she looks like, when she tried retro-engineering herself from her own DNA, this is what she got ...

How she does this, you will see here, in this short (well, it's longer than I usually post, clocking in at more than 11 minutes) documentary shot by Kari Mulholland. The video takes us from Heather sitting in her doctor's waiting room pondering a little hair stuck under glass in a picture frame, and then we move on, to her decision to collect loose hairs left on subway seats, tabletops, to the business of breaking DNA out of ordinary saliva or hair, to her finding the genetic bits that code for eye color, hair color and facial features online, to her ultimate works: 3-D sculptures that are now shown in art galleries all over the world.

As commentator Ellen Jorgensen says, Heather's project is "a very accessible way for the public to engage with this new technology. It really brings it to light how powerful it is, the idea that a hair from your head can fall on your street and a perfect stranger can pick it up and know something about it, and with DNA sequencing becoming faster and cheaper, this is the world we're all going to be living in."

I guess so. What I don't know is, How close is she getting, really? What I do know, is that while getting her Ph.D. and doing her art, she has managed to learn whatever it is you need to know to do this, and it didn't seem to take her that long.

I'm thinking, this is a game a lot of people can, and one day will, play. I hope they're nice people.

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Artist Plays Detective: Can I Reconstruct A Face From A Piece Of Hair?

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Britain set to allow babies to be born with THREE genetic parents in world first

28 Jun 2013 00:00

It is controversial due to fears over genetic engineering, but supporters claim only a tiny bit of DNA is changed

Getty

Britain could become the first nation to allow babies to be born with three genetic parents, officials will announce today.

A landmark decision by the Department of Health opens the door to treatments for diseases that make use of donated DNA from a second donor mum.

New regulations to fertility law allowing the procedures will be issued for public consultation later this year and then debated in Parliament.

If MPs find them ethically acceptable the first patients could be treated within months.

Around 10 three parent babies could be born every year.

Allowing the currently illegal techniques would mark a turning point because it means altering the germ line made up of inherited DNA.

Experts say only the tiny amount of DNA in a cells battery packs - the mitochondria - would be changed.

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3-D Printing and Additive Manufacturing preview issue publishing Fall 2013

Public release date: 28-Jun-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Sophie Mohin smohin@liebertpub.com 914-740-2100 Mary Ann Liebert, Inc./Genetic Engineering News

New Rochelle, NY, June 28, 2013Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers announces the launch of 3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing, a highly innovative, peer-reviewed journal on this rapidly growing disruptive technology. The preview issue will publish in the fall of 2013, and quarterly thereafter in 2014. Editor-in-Chief Hod Lipson, PhD, is the Director of Cornell University's Creative Machines Lab at the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.

The Journal will include original articles, exclusive interviews with top professionals and innovators in the field, commentaries, opinion pieces, industry reports, a debate section, webinars, videos, and podcasts. 3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing will publish comprehensive and timely authoritative world-class material and will enable readers to become global participants in a unique multimedia platform.

###

To sign up for email alerts for 3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing contact journalmarketing2@liebertpub.com.

About the Publisher

Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers is a privately held, fully integrated media company known for establishing authoritative peer-reviewed journals, including Big Data, New Space, Soft Robotics, Tissue Engineering, Rejuvenation Research, and Environmental Engineering Science. Its biotechnology trade magazine, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News (GEN), was the first in its field and is today the industry's most widely read publication worldwide. A complete list of the firm's more than 70 journals, newsmagazines, and books is available on the Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers website.

Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. 140 Huguenot Street, New Rochelle, NY 10801-5215 http://www.liebertpub.com Phone (914) 740-2100 (800) M-LIEBERT Fax (914) 740-2101

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Old wheat, new genetic engineering may protect crop from deadly pest

Wheat stem rust goes after its favorite meal.

Evans Lagudah and Zakkie Pretorius

Currently, roughly 20 percent of humanity's caloric intake comes from wheat. Agricultural strains, specialized for bread or pasta production, have been bred for high productivity and resistance to many agricultural pests. But over the past few years, one of those pests, a fungus called wheat stem rust, has evolved the ability to overcome wheat's defenses. Dangerous strains of wheat stem rust were first spotted in Uganda, but are now present elsewhere in Africa, in Yemen, and in some areas of Iran. That's set off an international scramble to find ways of generating a resistant wheat before the rust spreads any further.

By working with uncultivated relatives of agricultural wheat, two teams of scientists have identified a pair of genes, each of which provides partial resistance to the new strain of stem rust. Although each gene can be bred back into commercial wheat strains, the combination of the two is likely to be even more potent, so the researchers are considering putting them on a single DNA construct and then engineering that into various agricultural strains.

Wheat stem rust infections severely limit the plant's productivity and can kill it in severe infections. In the early 1900s, outbreaks in the US would routinely destroy a double-digit percentage of the nation's harvest. The breeding of resistant strains of wheat was thereforea major accomplishment. In 1999, however, researchers in Uganda discovered a new strain of stem rust (Ug99) that could infect resistant crops. Since then, the fungus has spread to other parts of Africa, and resistant strains have been spotted in the Middle East. Tests indicate that roughly 90 percent of the currently cultivated wheat strains are vulnerable to it. In 2005, a group was formed to coordinate international efforts to breed a resistant crop.

Fortunately, a significant number of wild relatives of wheat, along with strains that are no longer cultivated, have been maintained. Current agricultural strains are hexaploid, meaning they have six sets of chromosomes instead of the usual two (the extra chromosomes affect wheat's growth and seed production), with two sets each coming from three different wheat strains. One of those three strains turned out to be partially resistant to the Ug99 strain; in another case, a wild relative of another strain that contributed chromosomes to commercial wheat turned out to be resistant. The genes involved are Sr33 and Sr35, respectively.

Since those discoveries, scientists have been doing the painstaking task of breeding the individual genes back into non-resistant strains of wheat and generating a genetic map to identify where it resides in the genome. Once they had narrowed it down to a handful of genes, they took a resistant strain and exposed it to mutagens. Some of the wheat offspring became susceptible to Ug99 again, and DNA sequencing revealed the specific gene that was mutated, allowing researchers to identify the source of resistance.

Both Sr33 and Sr35 turned out to be related to a large family of pathogen resistance genes in plants, all of which share the ability to bind nucleotides like ATP and have a long stretch that allows two of them to wrap around each other in what's called a coiled-coil. In each case, the genes were part of a cluster of related resistance genes; recombination among them appears to help create a diverse set of resistance proteins.

The previous breeding work shows that these genes work when bred into other strains of wheat, but one of the studies went well beyond that, cloning Sr35 and inserting it into a gene transfer vector. When the DNA for the vector was inserted into a new strain of wheat, some of the offspring were resistant to Ug99.

The authors of both papers suggest that having both Sr33 and Sr35 present is more likely to provide full resistance to Ug99, and limit the stem rust fungus from evolving tolerance a second time. But it would take years to breed just one of the genes into a commercial wheat strain, and then breed back the strain's useful agricultural properties. So, the papers advocate putting both Sr33 and Sr35 into a gene transfer vector, and doing some genetic modification of existing wheat strains. That process would greatly accelerate the full availability of resistant strains.

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Old wheat, new genetic engineering may protect crop from deadly pest

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Study: Monsanto GMO food claims probably false

Oops. The World Food Prize committees got a bit of egg on its facegenetically engineered egg. They justawardedthe World Food Prize to three scientists, including one from Syngenta and one from Monsanto, who invented genetic engineering because,they say, the technology increases crop yields and decreases pesticide use. (Perhaps not coincidentally, Monsanto and Syngenta are majorsponsorsof the World Food Prize, along with a third biotech giant, Dupont Pioneer.)

Monsanto makes the same case on itswebsite, saying, Since the advent of biotechnology, there have been a number of claims from anti-biotechnology activists that genetically modified (GM) crops dont increase yields. Some have claimed that GM crops actually havelower yields than non-GM crops GM crops generally have higher yields due to both breeding and biotechnology.

But thats not actually the case. A new peer-reviewed study published in theInternational Journal of Agricultural Sustainabilityexamined those claims and found that conventional plant breeding, not genetic engineering, is responsible for yield increases in major U.S. crops. Additionally, GM crops, also known as genetically engineered (GE) crops, cant even take credit for reductions in pesticide use. The studys lead author, Jack Heinemann, is not an anti-biotechnology activist, as Monsanto might want you to believe. Im a genetic engineer. But there is a different between being a genetic engineer and selling a product that is genetically engineered, he states.

The study compared major crop yields and pesticide use in North America, which relies heavily on GE crops, and Western Europe, which grows conventionally bred non-GE crops. The studys findings are important for the future of the U.S. food supply, and therefore for the world food supply since the U.S. is a major exporter of many staple crops.

Heinemann, a professor of molecular biology at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and director of the Center for Integrated Research in Biosafety, says he first began looking into the matter after he heard a remark made by Paul Collier in 2010. Both Heinemann andCollier, an Oxford economics professor and author of the bestselling bookThe Bottom Billion, were speaking at a conference in Zurich.

Collier made the offhand remark during his talk that because Europe has shunned GMOs [genetically modified organisms], its lost productivity compared to the US, Heinemann recalls. That seemed odd to me. So while he was talking, I went to the FAO [UN Food and Agriculture Organization] database and I had a look at yields for corn. And over the short term, from 1995 to 2010, the US and Western Europe were neck and neck, there was no difference at all. So his assertion that lack of GMOs was causing Europe to fall behind didnt seem true.

Heinemann attempted to ask Collier for the source of his facts through the conferences Internet-mediated audience Q&A system, but he never got an answer. He continued poking around for data and stumbled upon what he calls the textbook example of the problems that come from a low genetic diversity in agriculture the 1970 Southern corn leaf blight epidemic.

Really what happened by 1970 was that upwards of 85 percent of the corn grown in the US was almost genetically identical, explains Heinemann. The US is the worlds biggest producer of corn and both geographically and in quantity, so when you cover that much land with a crop of such a low genetic diversity, youre simply asking for it to fail In 1970 a previously unknown pathogen hit the US corn crop and the US almost lost the entire crop. It was a major crisis of the day. The only thing that saved the corn crop was that the weather changed in 1971 and that weather change wasnt as favorable to the pathogen, so it gave farmers and breeders and extra year to swap over the corn germplasm to a variety that wasnt as vulnerable.

All told, the epidemic cost an estimated five trillion kilocalories in lost food energy, making it many times larger than the Irish potato famine, said Heinemann.

Now that was in a day where biofuels were not being made from corn. So there was no competition for those food calories Fast-forward to the drought of 2012. How many food calories were lost because of it? In kilocalories, its 89 trillion just from the drought. Thats just from an annual variation due to weather The U.S. is the biggest producer and exporter of corn.

See more here:
Study: Monsanto GMO food claims probably false

Recommendation and review posted by Bethany Smith


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