Table of Contents

REGULATORY NEWS

In Australia: Victory for GE Crop Farmer, GE Flies on Trial, and Defeat for Gene Patents
Phill Jones

Victory for GE Crop Farmer
For the second time, Australian organic farmers failed to convince a court that their neighbor should be held liable for genetically engineered (GE) crop contamination. The case began in 2010 when Michael Baxter harvested his GE canola. Baxter's contractor swathed GE canola, and while the cut plants were drying, wind blew some of the GE canola onto Eagle Rest land.
GE Flies on Trial
In Western Australia, the fruit flies cost the horticulture industry millions of dollars every year in lost production and costs of controlling the flies. Pesticides offered one method of control. But growers turned to other techniques after organophosphates were banned from Australian orchards. The current popular method for controlling Medflies is the Sterile Insect Technique.
Defeat for Gene Patents
Despite years of precedent, the US Supreme Court decided that "genes and the information they encode are not patent eligible . . . simply because they have been isolated from the surrounding genetic material." Justice John Nicholas of the Federal Court of Australia concluded that a valid patent may be granted for a claim that covers naturally-occurring nucleic acid that has been isolated from human cells.

PLANT RESEARCH NEWS

Improving Water-use Efficiency and Drought Tolerance
Lai-Sheng Meng

Globally, water deficiency increasingly contributes to a significant decline in plant production. improving water-use efficiency and drought tolerance are effective strategies for addressing this problem. In many cases, a key strategy is to genetically engineer genes involved in regulating the stomata number or density or the root systems. Regulatory genes that activate or deactivate suites of drought-responsive genes or relative gene cascades are of particular interest to biotechnologists.

Towards the Pangenome
Agnieszka Golicz and David Edwards

The availability of a reference genome for a species is only the first step towards understanding how hereditary material is related to the observed phenotype of the organism. With the increase in genome sequencing projects, it is becoming clear that minor variations are one of many forms of inherited variation resulting in changes in phenotype. The concept that individuals within a species all have the same genome is now clearly incorrect, and studies are currently underway in a range of species to understand the complete gene content for the species, known as the species pangenome.