Bill Gates: GMO seeds can help farmers adapt to climate change
Reading Time: < 1 minuteIN a conference call during the Global Climate Action Summit held in San Francisco on September 12-14, 2018, Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said that the power of innovation should extend to climate change. Gates believes that innovation will be key to confronting climate change, helping those affected by it, […]
Genome editing takes the podium at APEC Meet
Reading Time: 2 minutesBRISBANE: Eighteen APEC-member economies and five non-member economies met in Brisbane, Australia at the APEC High Level Policy Dialogue on Agricultural Biotechnology (APEC HLPDAB). The focus of the annual meet shifted this year to genome editing with the precision breeding technology set to revolutionise industries beyond agriculture, while regulatory cooperation was another key focus. Participants […]
Dengue fever outbreak halted by release of wolbachia mosquitoes
Reading Time: 2 minutesRESEARCH led by the World Mosquito Programme’s Director, Professor Scott O’Neill, for the first time an entire city has been protected from viral disease dengue. The research has shown that the WMP’s Wolbachia method can be deployed cost effectively at citywide scale, preventing local dengue transmission. The paper reviews data from the first citywide deployment […]
Bangladesh benefits from Bt brinjal
Reading Time: < 1 minuteSINCE the approval of Bt eggplant for “limited cultivation” in Bangladesh in 2013, ~17% of the total brinjal farmers in the country are already benefiting from the technology. Scientists concisely report the history, present status, and future direction of the Bt eggplant project in Bangladesh in a perspective article in Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology. […]
GM rice that can neutralise HIV
Reading Time: < 1 minuteAN INTERNATIONAL team of researchers from Spain, the United States, and the United Kingdom has successfully created a strain of genetically modified (GM) rice that will produce HIV-neutralising proteins. Scientists have been developing possible treatments for people infected with HIV. Their efforts to produce a vaccine against the virus have been unsuccessful, but oral medications […]
Costly delay
Reading Time: < 1 minuteTHE Philippines is losing as much as PHP33.85 billion (US$634 million) due to delay in commercialising the insect resistant Bt eggplant, according to Dr Cesar Quicoy, an economist from the University of the Philippines Los Baños. Quicoy studied the cost of delaying the commercialisation of Bt eggplant in the country in three different adoption rate […]
Because ‘food matters’, here’s food for thought
Reading Time: 2 minutesFOOD MATTERS. It is a basic human need, yet its availability in adequate, safe, nutritious and regular amounts for humans is by no means assured. While land and water for food production are both declining at alarming rates due to natural and human causes, the demand for food is still growing as populations all over […]
EU will regulate gene-edited organisms as GMOs
Reading Time: 6 minutesBY GREGORY JAFFE THE long wait is over. The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has reached the unambiguous conclusion that organisms made by any mutagenesis method are GMOs under the European GMO regulations. In the decision released on July 25, the Court stated that a small subset of mutagenesis techniques “which have been conventionally used […]
Scientists use ‘gene knock’ to fight disease resistance in food crops
Reading Time: < 1 minuteA NEW gene editing technique has the potential to confer broad spectrum disease resistance to specific staple crops without affecting other physical traits, according to a scientist from Texas A&M AgriLife Research. Dr Junqi Song, a plant pathologist in AgriLife together with his team of researchers, explores how a “knock-in” gene editing approach might achieve […]
Educators encounter molecular biology upfront
Reading Time: 2 minutesRAWANG: It is not always easy to introduce school students to the concepts of DNA in class as it could be hard for them to visualise how the minute and complex structure appears. The Lab-Ind Resources (LIR) Sdn Bhd has on the 20th and 27th June 2018 conducted a workshop for trainers and educators to […]