May 2014 Breaking News Mixing Human DNA with Animal DNA Last days final hour news prophecy
May 2014 Breaking News Mixing Human DNA with Animal DNA - Last Days End Times News Prophecy Update - Genetic Engineering.

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May 2014 Breaking News Mixing Human DNA with Animal DNA Last days final hour news prophecy - Video

Welcome to GM in Australia, a The Conversation series looking at the facts, ethics, regulations and research into genetically modified (GM) crops. In this first instalment, Peter Langridge describes two GM techniques: selective breeding and genetic engineering.

GENETIC modification (GM) sounds very laboratory-based people in white coats inserting and deleting genes but the vast majority of GM work was completed in the field through selective breeding.

Early Middle Eastern farmers collected grain from natural grasslands, but they needed to time their harvest very carefully. If they were too early the grain wouldnt store well, and if they were too late the grain would spread over the ground making collection difficult.

At some stage, one of these early farmers must have noticed that some heads remained fixed on their stems even after the grain was fully dry. He obviously didnt understand this at the time, but these were plants with a mutation in the genes controlling seed dispersal.

Farmers began preferentially choosing plants with this useful mutation and planting them, perhaps the first case of breeding and selecting for a novel trait.

Gregor Mendel.

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Systematic breeding really began in the early 1900s when scientists rediscovered Silesian monk Gregor Mendels groundbreaking work on genetic inheritance in peas.

Breeding involves utilising genetic variation to produce new combinations of genes and gene variants. A breeder will cross two different lines and then select offspring that have improved performance.

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GM: from the field to the lab

Take a hot new method that's opened up a new era of genetic engineering, apply it to the wonder stem cells that in 2012 won their discoverer a Nobel prize, and you might just have a tool to cure HIV infection.

That's the hope of researchers led by Yuet Kan of the University of California, San Francisco and they have proved the basic principle, altering the genome of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to give them a rare natural mutation that allows some people to resist HIV.

Kan's work relies on "genome editing" snipping out a particular DNA sequence and replacing it with another. It's much more precise than traditional forms of genetic engineering, in which sequences are added to the genome at random locations.

To alter the stem cells, Kan's team turned to the CRISPR-Cas9 system, a super-efficient method of genome editing based on an ancient bacterial "immune system". In bacteria, the system takes fragments of DNA from invading viruses and splices them into the cell's own DNA, where they act like "wanted" posters, allowing the viruses to be recognised and attacked in future.

About 1 per cent of people of European descent are resistant to HIV, because they carry two copies of a mutation in the gene for a protein called CCR5. The virus must lock onto this protein before it can invade white blood cells, and the mutations prevent it from doing so.

Using a bone marrow transplant from a naturally HIV-resistant person, Timothy Ray Brown was famously "cured" of HIV infection. Kan's goal is to achieve the same result without the need to find compatible HIV-resistant bone marrow donors who are in vanishingly short supply.

It's fairly easy to make iPSCs from a person's cells, which then have the potential to grow into any type of cell in the body. So if iPSCs could be given two copies of the protective mutation, it should be possible to make personalised versions of the therapy that cleared HIV from Brown's body. Kan's team has now shown that CRISPR-Cas9 can efficiently make the necessary genome edit. As expected, white blood cells grown from these altered stem cells were resistant to HIV upon testing.

"It's a really fantastic application of the tool," says Philip Gregory, chief scientific officer with Sangamo BioSciences of Richmond, California. However, he warns that there is a long way to go before it can be turned into a practical therapy.

Kan has not yet grown the iPSCs into the specific type of white blood cells called CD4+ T cells that are ravaged by HIV. What he instead plans to do is turn the iPSCs into blood-forming stem cells, which when transplanted into the body would give rise to all of the cell types found in the blood. "One of the problems is converting iPSCs into a type of cell that is transplantable," says Kan. "It is a big hurdle."

Regulators will also need to be convinced that cells that have been subjected to extensive genetic manipulation both to create the iPSCs, and to give them the protective mutation are safe.

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Gene editing tool can write HIV out of the picture

Clewiston, FL -

Numbers released Wednesday by the US Department of Agriculture show production of oranges in Florida is projected to be down 22 percent this month compared to the same time last year.

Citrus experts expect the numbers will continue to fall.

The main reason for the decline comes from an insect that is as common as the mosquito in Florida, which is spreading an incurable disease called Citrus Greening.

Oranges are a $9-billion industry in the state and to help protect it, everything is being considered including genetic engineering.

Southern Gardens Citrus in Clewiston is spearheading some genetic research. Its facility processes 25,000 oranges per minute, with the capacity of making 600,000 gallons of juice per day.

The groves feeding the facility are in visible distress. There are rows of stumps left behind from infected trees, where 800,000 have been infected so far.

President of Southern Gardens Citrus, Ricke Kress, has been looking for a cure for nine years. He's been with the company since 2005, which is the same year the disease was found in his groves.

"I had been here about a month." Kress Said, adding, "if we take out every infected tree we're basically not going to have any trees left.

Citrus Greening is spread through bacteria called Asian Citrus Psyllid, which essentially cuts off nutritional flow inside of the tree.

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Florida orange production down, projections show

Movie Fun Run ICGEB 2014

By: International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology

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Movie Fun Run ICGEB 2014 - Video

EDMONTON - If you, like many consumers, shop for food in the middle aisles of the grocery store where processed foods fill the shelves, you are likely buying products that contain genetically modified ingredients.

Yet you probably arent aware which products contain which modified ingredients, since in Canada there are no requirements that GM foods be labelled. Nor are you likely aware why and how the ingredients have been modified.

And, no doubt, youre unsure if it matters.

Genetic modification has been a polarizing issue since genetically modified seeds were first approved and planted in Canada in the mid-1990s. But with consumers increasingly keen to know where their food comes from, the topic of whats in their food is also attracting renewed attention.

I think people are genuinely interested in their food, says Ellen Goddard, a University of Alberta economist who studies consumer response to new technologies. Something about the GM debate has intrigued them. They want to know more about how their food is produced.

She adds: Consumers will almost always say they want more information.

Genetically modified organisms, popularly known as GMOs, are created when the genetic code is altered to either express a desirable trait or supress or remove an undesirable one. At its heart, genetic engineering is a short cut that speeds up the work of selective breeding, work that has been going on for centuries, but at a slower pace indeed, nearly every food crop grown today has been modified through this older process. Much of the opposition to genetic engineering of foods is focused on the practice of inserting genetic code from one organism into another, which cannot happen under natural circumstances.

Its this idea of mutant food forms that first spawned the Frankenfood nickname back in the 1990s.

The reality is only a few actual crops are genetically modified, but because they are widely used, they appear in many food products. The only GM crops grown in Canada are corn, soy, canola and sugar beets. But those crops are used in animal feed and as ingredients in thousands of processed foods on our grocery shelves. According to the Grocery Manufacturers Association, up to 75 per cent of conventional processed foods in a typical supermarket contain ingredients dervied from GMOs.

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Fields of gold ... or plains of ruin? The debate over genetically modified seeds in Alberta rages on