by Anastasia on 31 March 2010 Usually, when we think about biotechnology, it’s in the context of agriculture, and occasionally in the context of medicine, but biotechnology is useful for a lot more. It can be used to study complex cellular and developmental processes with results that can be stunningly beautiful, and sometimes silly.
Margaret Clarke researches the soil amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum using biotechnology. Dr. Clarke is officially retired, but as a dedicated scientist, she’s continuing her work. She visited Iowa State yesterday and today.
In particular, Dr. Clarke studies phagocytosis – literally “cell eating”. These amoeba are single celled organisms that eat bacteria (and just about any bacteria-sized particle that might be nutritious). Phagocytosis is the process of forming a cup that engulfs the prey, drawing the prey into the phagocyte, and digesting the prey.
Her work has important applications in human medicine, as the phagocytosis process takes place in special phagocytic cells that are part of the immune system of humans and other animals. Learning how phagocytosis works in amoeba can help us to understand how it works in the immune system.
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by Joe Ballenger on 29 March 2010
In Polydnaviruses: Nature’s GMOs, I wrote about how wasps use viruses to disable the immune defenses of their hosts. Braconid and ichneumonid wasps use a system that genetically modifies their hosts in order to shut their immune systems down.
So how does this all work?
A good system to use to describe how polydnavirus proteins work is the ankyrin/vankyrin pathways. It’s easy to visualize how they function and many other functions (Toll, Phenoloxidase silencing, etc) work in an indentical manner.
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by David Tribe on 27 March 2010 As I’ve mentioned before, I’m an Australian. But us Ozzies get to meet a lot of Americans.
American author of Seeds of Deception and public speaker Jeffrey Smith’s of Fairfield Iowa, first came to the attention of Australians when he was rolled out by the anti-GM activists to try and prevent Australian farmers being given the freedom of choice on crop technology in late 2007. Fortunately this effort by the anti-technology lobby groups was unsuccessful.
At most meetings organized by these activists that I have attended since that time — and there have been quite a few — stacks of his more recent book Genetic Roulette book were available for purchase, and I snapped up one early on.
A brief perusal of the articles revealed the book was highly biased. Nowhere in the book was there a mention of any of the major good outcomes from GM technology—such as decreased risk of cancer from mycotoxins in moldy corm (see this link for Chassy and Tribe’s efforts on this important topic at Academics Review). On the topics that I was most familiar such as antibiotic resistance in bacteria, Genetic Roulette was deeply misleading and factually wrong.
I decided late 2007 to investigate its claims thoroughly, little knowing how huge the task would be because as it turned out every one of the 65 claims in it — better called myths– was distorted, misleading, plain wrong, or based on misrepresentation or misreading of the sources it quoted.
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by Karl Haro von Mogel on 23 March 2010 Anastasia and James look like they have had a fun and scientifically enlightening trip to Italy to attend the Maize Genetics Conference. Frank was also there, but appears to have parted ways with them – off on some other adventure, I imagine. When they mentioned last year at the MGC that this year’s conference would be in Italy, I salivated and dreamed of the reams of data I would pile up to earn a ticket on the lab’s dollar. But no, I did not go to this year’s conference, except in name. (We had an official Biofortified poster that Anastasia and I put together, hoping for some new phloem for these here inter-sieve-tubes.)
I must say that I’m a bit jealous about missing out on all the science – conferences are great ways to cram your brain with the latest research and the directions the field is taking. The science is the same whether you are in Italy, or Illinois, Washington D.C., or even places as remote as… the capital of Wisconsin. I’m hoping to absorb half of what they retained by reading their excellent summaries.
But then again, they went to Italy! I’ve never been to Europe before. Heck I haven’t been out of North America unless you count the Hawaiian Islands. So I would be forlorn about that, if I wasn’t getting on a plane this morning and flying to Thailand!
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by Anastasia on 20 March 2010 One of the best parts of the Maize Genetics Meeting is the opportunity to have discussions with scientists working in a variety of fields from academia, industry, and NGOs. Conversation this afternoon veered towards intellectual property (IP) and biotechnology for a bit. It’s a contentious subject for a lot of reasons, but some new ideas I’d never thought of before came up today. I don’t have a background in IP, so please feel free share your thoughts and ideas in the comments!
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