This week in plant science news, the complete sequence of the wheat genome has now been mapped, and is published in Science. The dataset, generated after 13 years of collaborative and interdisciplinary research by the International Wheat Sequencing Consortium, will help plant breeders more quickly develop more nutritious, disease- and climate-resilient …
This week, a Californian jury ruled that glyphosate caused the cancer of groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson, awarding him $289 million in damages. While Monsanto maintains glyphosate’s safety (as do many scientific studies and regulatory organisations) and plans to appeal, this decision is likely to have an impact on agriculture worldwide as glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide in …
This week, we lead with a report from Phys.org that a team of researchers from Spain, the U.S. and the U.K. has genetically modified a strain of rice to produce HIV-neutralizing proteins. The rice produces one type of antibody and two kinds of proteins that bind directly to the HIV virus preventing it from …
This week we continue to report on reaction to the European Court of Justice’s ruling that gene-edited crops should be subject in the European Union to the same stringent regulations as conventional genetically modified (GM) organisms. Nature reports the decision as ‘a major setback for proponents of gene-edited crops, including …
As the Week in Review prepared to go to press this week, news broke that the EU’s top court had ruled that new gene-editing techniques such as CRISPR/Cas9 count as GMOs and should be regulated as such. This goes against the recommendations of the European Academies Science Advisory Council (EASAC)—the body representing …
West African researchers have committed to prevent the spread of virulent cassava brown streak disease with the West African Virus Epidemiology (WAVE) project, based in Bingerville, near Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. Funded by the Gates Foundation, the project covers West Africa Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Togo and …
This week saw the launch in Paris of the International Science Council – a new non-governmental association of science formed by a merger of the International Council for Science and the International Social Science Council. The council, led by its newly elected president Daya Reddy – who is a South African research …
This week, the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA) launched the annual report on the Global Status of Commercialized Biotech/GM Crops: 2017, which details recent data on the adoption of biotech crops, including their global impact, economic benefits and future prospects. According to the ISAAA, biotech crop land …
This week, B4FA highlights computational biologist Geoffrey Siwo who is out to ensure that the ground-breaking gene-editing tool CRISPR will be available to all scientists everywhere in the world. He argues, “if scientists in Africa can read open-access papers about CRISPR but have no means to use it in experiments, they still can’t transform that …
In Cotonou, Benin, last week, more than 300 cassava scientists, farmers, government representatives and private-sector stakeholders met to attend the fourth International Cassava Conference, an event convened triennially by the Global Cassava Partnership for the 21st Century (GCP21). Among the topics covered were biological, molecular and genomic advances including DNA fingerprinting …
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