Stronger Plants, Stronger Science, and Stronger Communication
This week, the G20 Agriculture Ministers gathered for their first-ever meeting to discuss potential measures to address price volatility and record high food prices. The key to any long-term solution is acknowledging that we need to empower the very people whose lives are most affected by food shortages. Three-quarters of the world’s poorest people get…
Nanotechnology Now – Press Release: “Nanostructured water treatment products to be worth $2.2 billion in 2015” Warnings from nutritional hell, with apologies to El Bosco We live in a world where whole organisations make comfortable incomes by demonising technology. These self-styled “technology critics” early successes included active blocking of the use of irradiation to make…
Update: Biofortified is now in the process of transferring to a new web host, please bear with us as we make this transition. Comments are temporarily disabled. Update 2: Biofortified has completed the move to our new server – comments are re-enabled! ***** You probably noticed the downtime that we experienced Monday afternoon. And memories…
(Updated 21-06-2011] Enough information is now emerging from the frantic work of the DNA sequencing teams and the crowdsourced intense detective work by bioinformatics experts (all mentioned in several previous posts at this site) to assemble a broad picture of how the German outbreak germ has evolved in recent years in terms of changes to its…
Read More “Worried about deliberate introduction of the German E. coli germ? Please read this.” »
It is widely known that pathogenic E. coli germs have ability to survive inside fresh vegetable produce such as spinach, lettuce and sprouts, where they are protected against disinfection. This ability may be a key factor explaining the transmission of the E. coli strain in the dreadful (and still ongoing) German outbreak. A new article has…
Read More “More about how the EHEC germ may get transmitted in plant material such as seeds” »
(Photomicrograph of Aspergillus nidulans, the species of mold that appears to have been the source of the 22-gene cluster that jumped to Podospora anserina, an unrelated species of mold. The Aspergillus genus contains a number of species that are beneficial and harmful to humans. (Creative Commons licensed Image via Özgür Bayram and Gerhard Braus) GMO…
Read More “Natural GMOs Part 90: Genes move between species in fungi” »
Entomologists Launch 5,000 Insect Genome Project (i5k) | Entomological Society of America (ESA) Entomologists Launch 5,000 Insect Genome Project (i5k) Lanham, MD; June 15, 2011 – It’s been called “the Manhattan Project of Entomology,” an undertaking that has the potential to revolutionize the way we think about insects. The i5k Initiative, also known as the…
The latest news is that the German outbreak strain of Escherichia coli is a member of small family of germs called EAEC that includes an African member (Ec55989 ). This family is clearly distinct from classical EHEC (=STEC) bacteria such as E. coli O157:H7. The Pundit will now start calling them EAEC/STEC recombinant or hybrid…
Do you like Honeycrisp apples, and have you ever wondered what it takes to breed delicious fruits like that? Well in April, UW-Madison was paid a visit by Jim Luby from the University of Minnesota, the apple (and wine grape) breeder who released the Honeycrisp apple. After his seminar, I got a chance to sit…
Written by Matt DiLeo I just went to the new “What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam?” exhibit at the National Archives. It tells the history of the government’s role in U.S. food and agriculture – a story of market protectionism, social engineering and the regulated tension between the aspirations of business and the demands of the people…