Agnet Dec. 10/03
‘GM seeds,
generic glyphosate taking a bigger bite out of major crop protection chemical
markets
US defends
GM trees in row at UN climate talks
GM foods
harmful, author says
History of
frog deformities suggests emerging disease
Vacuolar
sorting receptor for seed storage proteins in Arabidopsis thaliana
Altered
starch structure is associated with endosperm modification in Quality Protein
Maize
Old soil
study uncovers value of long-term nitrate research
California
rice farming
how to subscribe
‘GM
seeds, generic glyphosate taking a bigger bite out of major crop protection
chemical markets
Decemeber 10, 2003
From a press release
LITTLE FALLS, N.J. -- While the use of genetically modified seeds is still
generating negative reactions from European consumers, biotech is making a major
impact in the U.S. Adoption of herbicide-tolerant and insect-resistant seeds is
occurring at the same time as price erosion for glyphosate herbicide, the main
beneficiary of GM seed adoption. As a result, grower expenditures for crop
protection chemicals for corn, cotton, and soybeans are expected to drop by more
than $1 billion over the next five years, according to a recently published
study by Kline & Company.
This trend has already been seen in soybeans, and Kline's study, BIOTECH 2012
BUSINESS ANALYSIS, says the same is likely to occur in corn and cotton over the
next five years. Between 1996 and 2002, the adoption of Roundup Ready soybeans
-- and an accompanying price drop for glyphosate due to competition from generic
products -- reduced the lucrative soybean herbicide market by 35%. This equates
to more than $600 million at the grower level.
Crop protection chemical producers have therefore moved their basic research
focus away from soybean herbicides and toward niches in other crops that are
less likely to be affected by glyphosate tolerance. New soybean products
continue to be developed, but they are based on combining existing active
ingredients in new ways to achieve broader weed control, not on discovering new
actives.
"For other segments of the crop protection market -- mainly in insecticides
-- biotech seeds, not price erosion, will have the primary impact," says
Mancer Cyr, senior associate in Kline's Agribusiness Practice.
The introduction of several new insect resistance genes for corn over the next
few years will greatly reduce the need for insecticides to control corn
rootworm, cutworm, and armyworm. Kline's study predicts sales of conventional
insecticides for corn to plummet, falling from $300 million in 2002 to just $70
million in 2012.
"This effectively turns the largest single-pest insecticide market into a
smaller specialty market," says Cyr.
Offsetting the huge cost reduction benefit to growers is the requirement to pay
technology fees or seed premiums for the new seed traits. Industry leaders like
Monsanto, DuPont, and BASF have already taken steps to address the switch in
value from chemicals to seeds by rationalizing pesticide R&D and marketing
spending.
The next step for the leaders will be to rethink insecticide strategies, and to
focus on other trait opportunities, according to Cyr. After corn and cotton, the
remaining crop input traits present regulatory challenges and smaller returns.
But there are more attractive opportunities to develop entirely new businesses
based on value-added traits for food, industrial, and pharmaceutical uses.
"For firms that are still dealing only in chemicals and haven't started
exploring GM seed, their days as major basic suppliers could be numbered,"
says Cyr. "There could be room for them as niche suppliers as long as the
niches are small enough to discourage new biotech inroads and large enough to
keep the businesses afloat."
Established in 1959, Kline & Company is an international business consulting
firm serving the agribusiness and biotechnology industries.
US
defends GM trees in row at UN climate talks
December 10, 2003
Agence France Presse English
Richard Ingham
MILAN - Sources were cited as saying Wednesday that the United States and
Europe, already fiercely at odds over genetically modified food, skirmished over
GM trees at United Nations talks here on the future of the Kyoto Protocol.
The US delegation was cited as giving notice it would fight any EU attempts to
bar GM trees from a Kyoto scheme to plant forests that will help offset global
warming -- so-called "sinks" that soak up carbon dioxide (CO2), the
principal gas blamed for climate change.
The story says that a draft version of the text to define how this scheme should
be implemented said countries should evaluate "potential risks"
arising from the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and invasive
species, "in accordance with their national laws."
As a result, the contested text was shifted to the preamble of the document,
rather than its operative section.
Even though this move makes the reference to GM trees non-binding, Washington
insisted on putting its concerns on the record as "a miscellaneous
document.”
GM
foods harmful, author says
December 10, 2003
The Windsor Star
C4
Source: CanWest News Service
Jeffrey Smith, author of a new book, "Seeds of Deception: Exposing Industry
and Government Lies About the Safety of the Genetically Engineered Foods You're
Eating," was quoted as saying that, "We (are) tampering with a
fundamental level of nature and very few people are aware of it,” adding that
no one is certain about the long-term effects of messing with Mother Nature's
genetic codes.
History
of frog deformities suggests emerging disease
December 9, 2003
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Emily Carlson
A historical examination of amphibian deformities - frogs with extra legs
growing out of the abdomen, for example - suggests that these aberrations are
not a new phenomenon, but part of an emerging disease that could jeopardize the
survival of these organisms.
The research, described in the December issue of Conservation Biology, shows
that while amphibian malformations and the parasitic worm that causes them have
been found in lakes and ponds for more than 50 years, they have substantially
increased in their abundance during this period.
Pieter Johnson, a University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student in zoology
and lead author of the recent paper, says that frog deformities have been a hot
topic since the mid-1990s, when the abnormalities began to be widely observed.
To date, severely malformed frogs, toads and salamanders have been found among
60 different species in nearly all U.S. states, as well as parts of Canada,
Japan and several European countries.
The high number of amphibian deformities, explains Johnson, is of great
ecological concern. Severe limb deformities cripple amphibians, making it
difficult for them to catch food or escape predators. "We know that most
malformed frogs die before sexual maturity," says Johnson, adding that
these malformations, coupled with other factors, could threaten entire
populations of amphibians.
Keeping amphibians in lakes, ponds and other wetland environments is important
for a number of reasons, explains Johnson. These organisms are integral to the
food web - they gobble up a large number of insects and aquatic plants, and
snakes, fish and birds eat them. They also serve as an indicator species -
organisms scientists say can signal subtle changes in the environment.
"There's the personal appeal, too. Kids have always been fascinated with
frogs," says Johnson.
Although sightings of deformed frogs are more common today, they have been
reported by scientists, as well as the public, since as early as the 1940s, says
Johnson, when some of the first cases were described in research journals or
consumer publications.
Since then, researchers have searched for what causes the abnormalities. They
have investigated everything from ultraviolet radiation to chemical contaminants
to trematodes - parasitic flatworms that burrow into the hind legs of tadpoles.
The culprit for many of the deformities in amphibians turns out to be the tiny
parasitic worms, says Johnson, adding that both field and lab studies show that
the more abundant the parasite, the more frequent and severe the malformations.
Knowledge of this connection between parasites and deformities came in the early
1990s and coincided with frequent reports of frogs with missing or extra limbs.
The timing, explains Johnson, led some scientists to question whether what they
were observing resulted from some new phenomenon, or something that had always
been present in the environment.
The answer, says the Wisconsin ecologist, could lead to a better understanding
and, ultimately, improved management strategies for the apparent epidemic in
amphibian populations.
To determine how "new" the deformities caused by trematodes were,
Johnson and his colleagues stepped into libraries, museums and historic wetlands
to find out if the parasitic worm was involved in the deformities reported
decades ago. They focused on reports from 1946 to 1988 that described findings
from nine historical "hot spots" in California, Colorado, Idaho,
Mississippi, Montana, Ohio and Texas. Not only did they review this literature,
but they also described the abnormalities in contemporary terms, dissected
original specimens and resurveyed the original wetlands.
The main objectives, says Johnson, were to determine if the deformities reported
back then are similar to the ones reported today, if trematodes were present in
the preserved frogs and if those historical sites still are home to deformed
frogs, as well as the deforming parasites.
Basically, he says, "we wanted to know how different what we're seeing now
is from what was observed historically."
By and large, the majority of historical specimens had deformities in the hind
legs, similar to what's observed today. Nine specimens from one site, for
example, had 40 extra hind limbs. The researchers also found that the parasitic
flatworms had infected specimens from six of the historical sites, suggesting
that amphibian malformations caused by trematodes have occurred since the 1940s.
When Johnson and his collaborators revisited these historic sites, they found
that three wetlands continued to support the parasite and frogs with a high
percentage (7 to 50 percent) of severe malformations, such as missing or extra
limbs.
The finding of greatest significance, Johnson says, is in the increase in the
number of lakes and ponds that support deformed frogs during this period. While
fewer than one dozen of these sites are known from before 1990, Johnson says he
and his colleagues have discovered more than 50 hot spots for amphibian
malformations during the last seven years.
Based on this evidence, Johnson and his collaborators classify the frog and
other amphibian deformities as an emerging disease, one that has substantially
increased in occurrence, distribution and severity during the last 30 years.
By understanding the history of this disease in amphibians, Johnson says
researchers can begin to pinpoint ecological changes over the years that are
driving the emergence of more and more deformities in frogs, toads and
salamanders. While some scientists are investigating changes in pollution or
climate, Johnson is examining the role nutrient enrichment of water plays in
promoting the trematode parasite and amphibian deformities.
All these factors being studied, Johnson hypothesizes, may come together, much
in the same way that changes in the ecology of deer and mice, due to loss of
predators and reforestation, led to the rise of Lyme disease.
"The ecological changes that drive disease emergence are often
complex," says Johnson, "but an understanding of such changes is
critical toward preventing future epidemics in wildlife or in humans."
Vacuolar
sorting receptor for seed storage proteins in Arabidopsis thaliana
December 4, 2003
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 10.1073/pnas.2530568100
Tomoo Shimada *, Kentaro Fuji *, Kentaro Tamura *, Maki Kondo , Mikio Nishimura
, and Ikuko Hara-Nishimura *
*Graduate School of Science, Kyoto University, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8502, Japan;
and Department of Cell Biology, National Institute for Basic Biology, Okazaki
444-8585, Japan
Edited by Brian A. Larkins, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, and approved
September 25, 2003 (received for review January 30, 2003)
The seeds of higher plants accumulate large quantities of storage protein.
During seed maturation, storage protein precursors synthesized on rough
endoplasmic reticulum are sorted to protein storage vacuoles, where they are
converted into the mature forms and accumulated. Previous attempts to determine
the sorting machinery for storage proteins have not been successful. Here we
show that a type I membrane protein, AtVSR1/AtELP, of Arabidopsis functions as a
sorting receptor for storage proteins. The atvsr1 mutant missorts storage
proteins by secreting them from cells, resulting in an enlarged and
electron-dense extracellular space in the seeds. The atvsr1 seeds have distorted
cells and smaller protein storage vacuoles than do WT seeds, and atvsr1 seeds
abnormally accumulate the precursors of two major storage proteins, 12S globulin
and 2S albumin, together with the mature forms of these proteins. AtVSR1 was
found to bind to the C-terminal peptide of 12S globulin in a Ca2+-dependent
manner. These findings demonstrate a receptor-mediated transport of seed storage
proteins to protein storage vacuoles in higher plants.
Altered
starch structure is associated with endosperm modification in Quality Protein
Maize
December 5, 2003
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 10.1073/pnas.2136854100
Bryan C. Gibbon, Xuelu Wang *, and Brian A. Larkins
Department of Plant Sciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85741
Contributed by Brian A. Larkins, October 24, 2003
The biochemical basis of modified kernel texture in Quality Protein Maize (QPM)
is poorly understood. Proteomic analysis of several QPM lines indicated
increased levels of granule-bound starch synthase I in the soluble nonzein
protein fraction of these genotypes. Increased extraction of this enzyme
reflected a change in starch structure, which was manifested as shorter
amylopectin branches and increased starch-granule swelling. In mature kernels,
these alterations in starch structure were associated with interconnections
between starch granules that resulted in a vitreous kernel phenotype.
Understanding the molecular basis for this previously uncharacterized starch
structure will accelerate the development of QPM.
Old
soil study uncovers value of long-term nitrate research
December 10, 2003
ARS News Service
Agricultural Research Service, USDA
www.ars.usda.gov/news
An Agricultural Research Service experiment finished nearly 30 years ago--and
uncovered recently during new study preparations--shows that it's best to be
patient when measuring the movement of nitrates through soil and groundwater.
Mark Tomer and Michael Burkart, both soil scientists and hydrologists at the ARS
National Soil Tilth Laboratory in Ames, Iowa, found that nitrate applied during
the experiment--conducted between 1969 and 1974--apparently took nearly 30 years
to move through soils and reach a 70-foot-deep water table.
This shows that water carrying nitrate can take decades to flow through a
watershed's soil subsurface to a stream and should be studied for longer
periods, according to the scientists, who work in the lab's Agricultural Land
and Watershed Management Research Unit.
In the original study, conducted on a 74-acre field in western Iowa, fertilizer
was applied to soil at three times the normal rate. The resulting soil nitrate
concentration was tracked for the next decade.
In 1996, Tomer and Burkart were preparing to monitor groundwater for a new
experiment when they detected the nitrate 60 feet deep in the soil. They
confirmed that the nitrate originated from the old experiment by examining
groundwater flow rates and ages, and by comparing the concentration's depth with
stream flow records.
Leaching of nitrate from agricultural fertilizers has been linked to concerns
such as drinking-water quality and hypoxia, a condition in which water bodies
contain low oxygen amounts.
Farmers are being encouraged to use nitrogen more efficiently, but resulting
environmental improvements have been difficult to document using studies lasting
just two to four years, according to Tomer. In summary, he adds, application of
a conservation practice within a watershed may take several decades to fully
effect improvements in groundwater quality.
The results of this study were published in the November/December issue of the
Journal of Environmental Quality (http://jeq.scijournals.org), published by the
American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America and the Soil
Science Society of America.
California
rice farming
December 10, 2003
Associated Press
Seth Hettena
WILLIAMS, Calif. – According to this story, California’s rice farmers have
been criticized as water hogs for relying on millions of dollars in federal
subsidies to grow a low-value, water-intensive crop. In autumn, they choked the
air around the state capital with smoke from burning piles of harvest debris and
made Sacramento's drinking water taste funny.
The story says that over the past decade, that image has changed as the rice
industry has adopted practices that have won over even some of its harshest
critics. Most recently, the industry has been helped by California's search for
long-term solutions to its quest for water.
The story says that rice farmers free up water by fallowing land. Growers say
that taking the land out of production for a year or so gives the soil a
vacation that results in a healthier crop the next time around.On the Net:
California Rice Commission: http://www.calrice.org
USA Rice Federation: http://www.usarice.com
Department of Agriculture: http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/Rice/
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