Category Archives: Genetics
Origin of Photosynthesis Revealed
Schematic of Cyanophora paradoxa. (Credit: Courtesy of Bhattacharya Lab.)
Atmospheric oxygen really took off on our planet about 2.4 billion years ago during the Great Oxygenation Event. At this key juncture of our planet’s evolution, species had either to learn to cope with this poison that was produced by photosynthesizing cyanobacteria or they went extinct. It now seems strange to think that the gas that sustains much of modern life had such a distasteful beginning.
So how and when did the ability to produce oxygen by harnessing sunlight enter the eukaryotic domain, that includes humans, plants, and most recognizable, multicellular life forms? One of the fundamental steps in the evolution of our planet was the development of photosynthesis in eukaryotes through the process of endosymbiosis.
This crucial step forward occurred about 1.6 billion years ago when a single-celled protist captured and retained a formerly free-living cyanobacterium. This process, termed primary endosymbiosis, gave rise to the plastid, which is the specialized compartment where photosynthesis takes place in cells. Endosymbiosis is now a well substantiated theory that explains how cells gained their great complexity and was made famous most recently by the work of the late biologist Lynn Margulis, best known for her theory on the origin of eukaryotic organelles.
Story continues -> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120221125409.htm
Alzheimer’s could be catching
by Kate Taylor
New research raises the scary prospect that Alzheimer’s could be transmissible in a similar way to infectious prion diseases.
The brain damage seen with Alzheimer’s may originate in a form similar to that of diseases such as bovine spongiform encephalopathy – mad cow disease – and Creutzfeldt-Jakob, says a team at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston.
“”The underlying mechanism of Alzheimer’s disease is very similar to the prion diseases,” says neurology professor Claudio Soto.
“It involves a normal protein that becomes misshapen and is able to spread by transforming good proteins to bad ones. The bad proteins accumulate in the brain, forming plaque deposits that are believed to kill neuron cells in Alzheimer’s.”
Alzheimer’s is a form of progressive dementia that affects memory, thinking and behavior. There are around 5.4 million affected individuals in the US, of whom 90 percent suffer from a sporadic form. It’s the sixth leading cause of death in the country, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.
The team injected the brain tissue of a confirmed Alzheimer’s patient into mice, and compared the results to those from injected tissue of a control without the disease.
None of the mice injected with the control showed signs of Alzheimer’s, whereas all of those injected with Alzheimer’s brain extracts developed plaques and other brain alterations typical of the disease.
“The mouse developed Alzheimer’s over time and it spread to other portions of the brain,” says Soto.
“We are currently working on whether disease transmission can happen in real life under more natural routes of exposure.”
How to Hatch a Dinosaur
Photo: Dan Forbes; model maker: Jason Clay Lewis
By Thomas Hayden
People have told Jack Horner he’s crazy before, but he has always turned out to be right. In 1982, on the strength of seven years of undergraduate study, a stint in the Marines, and a gig as a paleontology researcher at Princeton, Horner got a job at Montana State University’s Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman. He was hired as a curator but soon told his bosses that he wanted to teach paleontology. “They said it wasn’t going to happen,” Horner recalls. Four years and a MacArthur genius grant later, “they told me to do whatever I wanted to.” Horner, 65, continues to work at the museum, now filled with his discoveries. He still doesn’t have a college degree.
When he was a kid in the 1950s, dinosaurs were thought to have been mostly cold, solitary, reptilian beasts—true monsters. Horner didn’t agree with this picture. He saw in their hundreds-of-millions-of-years-old skeletons hints of sociability, of animals that lived in herds, unlike modern reptiles. Then, in the 1970s, Horner and his friend Bob Makela excavated one of the most spectacular dinosaur finds ever—a massive communal nesting site of duck-billed dinosaurs in northwest Montana complete with fossilized adults, juveniles, and eggs. There they found proof of crazy idea number one: The parents at the site cared for their young. Judging by their skeletons, the baby duckbills would have been too feeble to forage on their own.
Horner went on to find evidence suggesting that, once hatched, the animals were fast-growing (crazy idea number two) and possibly warm-blooded (that would be three), and he continues to be at the forefront of the search for ancient bits of organic matter surviving intact in fossils (number four). Add in his work as a technical consultant on the Jurassic Park movies and Horner has probably done more to shape the way we currently think about dinosaurs than any other living paleontologist.
All of which means that people are more cautious about calling him crazy these days, even when he tells them what he plans to do next: Jack Horner wants to make a dinosaur. Not from scratch—don’t be ridiculous. He says he’s going to do it by reverse-evolving a chicken. “It’s crazy,” Horner says. “But it’s also possible.”
Over the past several decades, paleontologists—including Horner—have found ample evidence to prove that modern birds are the descendants of dinosaurs, everything from the way they lay eggs in nests to the details of their bone anatomy. In fact, there are so many similarities that most scientists now agree that birds actually are dinosaurs, most closely related to two-legged meat-eating theropods like Tyrannosaurus rex and velociraptor.
But “closely related” means something different to evolutionary biologists than it does to, say, the people who write incest laws. It’s all relative: Human beings are almost indistinguishable, genetically speaking, from chimpanzees, but at that scale we’re also pretty hard to tell apart from, say, bats.
Hints of long-extinct creatures, echoes of evolution past, occasionally emerge in real life—they’re called atavisms, rare cases of individuals born with characteristic features of their evolutionary antecedents. Whales are sometimes born with appendages reminiscent of hind limbs. Human babies sometimes enter the world with fur, extra nipples, or, very rarely, a true tail. Horner’s plan, in essence, is to start off by creating experimental atavisms in the lab. Activate enough ancestral characteristics in a single chicken, he reasons, and you’ll end up with something close enough to the ancestor to be a “saurus.” At least, that’s what he pitched at this year’s TED conference, the annual technology, entertainment, and design gathering held in Long Beach, California. “When I was growing up in Montana, I had two dreams,” he told the crowd. “I wanted to be a paleontologist, a dinosaur paleontologist—and I wanted to have a pet dinosaur.”
Story Continues -> How to Hatch a Dinosaur
Gene''s Location on Chromosome Plays Big Role in Shaping How an Organism''s Traits Evolve
New research shows that a gene”s location on a chromosome plays a significant role in shaping how an organism”s traits vary and evolve. (Credit: iStockphoto/Liang Zhang)
gene”s location on a chromosome plays a significant role in shaping how an organism”s traits vary and evolve, according to findings by genome biologists at New York University”s Center for Genomic and Systems Biology and Princeton University”s Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics. Their research, which appears in the latest issue of the journal Science, suggests that evolution is less a function of what a physical trait is and more a result of where the genes that affect that trait reside in the genome.
Physical traits found in nature, such as height or eye color, vary genetically among individuals. While these traits may differ significantly across a population, only a few processes can explain what causes this variation — namely, mutation, natural selection, and chance.
In the Science study, the NYU and Princeton researchers sought to understand, in greater detail, why traits differ in their amount of variation. But they also wanted to determine the parts of the genome that vary and how this affects expression of these physical traits. To do this, they analyzed the genome of the worm Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans). C. elegans is the first animal species whose genome was completely sequenced. It is therefore a model organism for studying genetics. In their analysis, the researchers measured approximately 16,000 traits in C. elegans. The traits were measures of how actively each gene was being expressed in the worms” cells.
The researchers began by asking if some traits were more likely than others to be susceptible to mutation, with some physical features thus more likely than others to vary. Different levels of mutation indeed explained some of their results. Their findings also revealed significant differences in the range of variation due to natural selection — those traits that are vital to the health of the organism, such as the activity of genes required for the embryo to develop, were much less likely to vary than were those of less significance to its survival, such as the activity of genes required to smell specific odors.
However, these results left most of the pattern of variation in physical traits unexplained — some important factor was missing.
To search for the missing explanation, the researchers considered the make-up of C. elegans” chromosomes — specifically, where along its chromosomes its various genes resided.
Chromosomes hold thousands of genes, with some situated in the middle of their linear structure and others at either end. In their analysis, the NYU and Princeton researchers found that genes located in the middle of a chromosome were less likely to contribute to genetic variation of traits than were genes found at the ends. In other words, a gene”s location on a chromosome influenced the range of physical differences among different traits.
The biologists also considered why location was a factor in the variation of physical traits. Using a mathematical model, they were able to show that genes located near lots of other genes are evolutionarily tied to their genomic neighbors. Specifically, natural selection, in which variation among vital genes is eliminated, also removes the differences in neighboring genes, regardless of their significance. In C. elegans, genes in the centers of chromosomes are tied to more neighbors than are genes near the ends of the chromosomes. As a result, the genes in the center are less able to harbor genetic variation.
The research was conducted by Matthew V. Rockman, an assistant professor at New York University”s Department of Biology and Center for Genomics and Systems Biology as well as Sonja S. Skrovanek and Leonid Kruglyak, researchers at Princeton University”s Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
The study was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health.
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by New York University.
Journal Reference:
- M. V. Rockman, S. S. Skrovanek, L. Kruglyak. Selection at Linked Sites Shapes Heritable Phenotypic Variation in C. elegans. Science, 2010; 330 (6002): 372 DOI: 10.1126/science.1194208
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101014144312.htm
The platypus knows 80 different ways to poison you
Genome analysis shows that the monotremes and snakes have similar venoms.
By Ewen Callaway
Don””t be fooled by the playful-looking duck””s bill — platypuses deliver a venom containing more than 80 different toxins.
The finding, from an analysis of the genes encoding the dangerous mixture, also reveals the striking similarities between the poisons of different animals. The genes resemble those of other venomous animals, such as snakes, lizards, starfish and sea anemones.
Like eyes, fins and wings, which have evolved independently in a number of different lineages, platypus venom looks to be an example of convergent evolution, says Wesley Warren, a genomicist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, who led the study, published in the journal Genome Biology.1
The platypus — a semi-aquatic egg-laying mammal found in Australia — is one of few mammals to make venom, which males produce in abdominal venom glands and deliver through spurs on their hind legs. They only make the poison during breeding season, and Warren thinks that males probably deploy it to defend their turf against other males.
By some accounts, being poisoned by a platypus could qualify as punishment in one of Dante””s circles of hell. In one case report2, Australian doctors described their treatment of a 57-year-old man a few hours after he grabbed one of the small mammals while fishing. The pain was “so bad I started to become incoherent” the man said, and far worse than the shrapnel wounds he took as a soldier. Ibuprofen and morphine provided no relief, and one finger was swollen and ached more than 4 months after the run-in.
Efforts to find the molecules capable of inflicting such anguish have focused on separating and characterizing proteins in venom extracts. This approach identified three of the most abundant ingredients of platypus venom, but Warren””s team suspected that more molecules were present at lower levels.
What””s your poison?
His team sequenced messenger RNA transcripts from the venom gland of a male platypus, killed by a dog in breeding season. To identify venom ingredients they looked for genes that were not produced in other tissues and which resembled venom genes from other animals. This scan turned up 83 genes in 13 different families of toxins, linked to effects including inflammation, nerve damage, muscle contraction and blood coagulation. For instance, platypuses make 26 different kinds of serine protease enzymes, which are also found in the venom of most snakes, and seven of their venom genes resemble a neurotoxin produced by spiders called α-latrotoxin.
Additional tests will be needed to determine what each venom ingredient does, says Warren. He also thinks that his team””s study undercounted the number of toxin-encoding genes in the platypus ””venome””, because the method used overlooks genes that bear little resemblance to other animal toxins. To find these, his team plans to look for genes switched on during the seasonal development of the platypus venom gland.
Nonetheless, the platypus venome supports work in other animals showing widespread convergence in venom gene evolution. Warren says that this probably happens when genes that perform normal chores, such as blood coagulation, become duplicated independently in different lineages, where they evolve the capacity to carry out other jobs.
Animals end up using the same genes as building blocks for venom because only a subset of the proteins the genes encode have the structural and functional properties to become venoms, he adds.
Despite such convergence, closely related animals tend to produce similar venoms, says Bryan Fry, head of the venomics laboratory at the University of Melbourne, Australia.
An evolutionary outlier such as the platypus is likely to produce a venom with new components, says Fry. “If you want to find something potentially useful in drug design and development from a venom, you””re much likelier to find it in a novel venom such as platypus venom than if you are looking at, say, rattlesnakes.”
Corrected:
An earlier version of this story stated incorrectly that platypuses were marsupials. They are monotremes.
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References
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101012/full/news.2010.534.html?s=news_rss
http://io9.com/5663979/the-platypus-knows-80-different-ways-to-poison-you
Genetically Engineered Silkworms Spin Like Spiders
The new silk alone could shake up the textile industry by creating a softer and stronger fabric that still looks like silk. Click to enlarge this image. Hemera
Silkworms have been modified to produce spider silk, creating a fabric that could be used in everything from bulletproof clothing to artificial tendons.
By Eric Bland
- Silkworms have been genetically engineered to spin spider silk.
- The new hybrid silk is finer and tougher than ordinary silk.
- The development could lead to wound-healing, lighter body armor as well as artificial tissue.
If Spider-Man ever ran out of webs, he could now enlist an army of silkworms to spin extra high-tensile spider silk.
Scientists have created a genetically modified silkworm that spins a new kind of silk: a hybrid of silkworm silk and spider silk.
The new material alone could shake up the textile industry, while future silk hybrids could be used in everything from bulletproof clothing to artificial tendons.
“Compared to normal spider silk, it””s not as strong,” said Malcolm Fraser, a scientist from the University of Notre Dame. “But we are confident that, this being our first attempt, that we will be able to tweak the system to bring the system closer to the strength of true spider silk.”
Fraser, along with professor Randy Lewis from the University of Wyoming, developed the spider-silk-spinning silkworms.
Silkworms have helped clothe people for thousands of years by reliably producing large quantities of a soft, supple and luxurious material.
Spider dragline silk is significantly stronger than silkworm silk — so strong that it can best steel wire — but it is hard to make.
“They just don””t produce enough silk,” said Fraser, who notes that a golden cloth on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City required more than one million spiders to produce. “One million silkworms can produce considerably more silk than one million spiders.”
The new silk is a hybrid of spider silk and silkworm silk. It is stronger and finer than silkworm silk, but not quite as strong as spider silk. “It would definitely be stronger (than a normal silk shirt),” said Lewis. “But it wouldn””t flow like silkworm silk does.”
“It””s a fabulous accomplishment,” said Cheryl Hayashi, a spider silk expert and a professor at the University of California, Riverside.
Other groups have produced spider silk protein in plants, in bacteria and even in goat””s milk. But spider silk protein is not the same as spun spider silk. The silkworms have the necessary body parts to spin the protein into silk threads — and to produce it in large quantities.
The new silk alone could shake up the textile industry by creating a softer, stronger fabric that still looks like silk.
Fraser and his team, however, have bigger plans in mind.
In this work the Notre Dame and University of Wyoming scientists replaced only one of multiple silk-producing genes in silkworms with spider silk genes. Eventually they want to replace multiple silkworm silk-producing genes with spider silk genes.
In particular, they hope to insert genes from the newly discovered Darwin””s Bark Spider (Caerostris darwini), which produced silk twice as strong as any other. That””s more than 10 times stronger than Kevlar, a fabric commonly found in bulletproof vests.
Mass produced, stronger-than-steel spider silk will also have a range of biomedical applications, said Fraser and Lewis. Hybrid silk could be speed wound-healing, eliminate or reduce the need for cadaver-derived tendons and ligaments.
http://news.discovery.com/tech/spider-silk-silkworms-genetic-engineering.html
British Ethics Group Calls for Regulations on Testing Sold Directly to Consumers
Genetic tests: Should they be regulated? (Source: 23andMe)
Tests often provide medically meaningless data according to ethics group
With medical technology becoming more and more advanced, we have numerous new medical tests that doctors can use to check for various disease conditions. Some of the new genetic tests can be used to determine the chance a patient might have of developing a serious disease like cancer or diabetes at some point in their lives.
The interesting part about many of these genetic tests is that there is a market for direct sales of genetic testing to people that have no symptoms or reason to worry they might develop a certain disease. A new report by a British medical ethics groups has asked that private DNA testing be accredited and have to live up to certain standards to protect consumers.
The group maintains that many of these genetic tests provide “medically and therapeutically meaningless” results and that these false results could lead the person paying for the tests to pay for further testing that isn’t needed and to needlessly worry about their medical condition. The group, called the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, maintains that the results of many genetic tests are “unclear, unreliable, or inaccurate.” In addition to regulating genetic testing, the group also wants regulations placed on body scanning services using MRI and CT scans.
Christopher Hood, one of the authors of the report publishes by the ethics group said, “The internet is now often the first port of call for people to find out more about their health. People need to know where they can get accurate health information, how to buy medicines online safely and how any personal information about their health posted online might be used.”
The genetic tests are generally conducted using a DNA sample derived from saliva. Google-backed a company providing these direct to consumer genetic testing in Europe back in 2008. The company is called 23andMe. The genetic tests the company sold cost $999 when it launched and claimed to read over 600,000 genetic points on the donor”s genetic makeup looking for potential issues.
Speaking directly about the use of CT and MRI scans, another of the report authors named Nikolas Rose said, “The reliability of these tests is questionable. And even if the tests were reliable, the increases in risk over that in the general population that are given to you by these tests are usually minimal, and in almost all circumstances they have no clinical relevance.”
The group maintains that when a full body scan is conducted of a person with no real reason other than to satisfy curiosity, the amount of radiation the user is exposed to is more harmful than most disease conditions that the test may potentially discover. The tests also often uncover anomalies that are meaningless and cause needless worry for the patient.
On the Trail of the Epigenetic Code: Test System on Drosophila Should Provide the Key to Histone Function
The condensation of the DNA involves a dramatic restructuring of the two metre-long DNA thread to a chromosome that has a diameter of 1.5 micrometres. The DNA is wound around the packaging proteins called “histones”. (Credit: Max Planck Society)
Test system on Drosophila should provide the key to histone function. The genetic inherited material DNA was long viewed as the sole bearer of hereditary information. The function of its packaging proteins, the histones, was believed to be exclusively structural. Additional genetic information can be stored, however, and passed on to subsequent generations through chemical changes in the DNA or histones.
Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen have succeeded in creating an experimental system for testing the function of such chemical histone modifications and their influence on the organism. Chemical modifications to the histones may constitute an “epigenetic histone code” that complements the genetic code and decides whether the information from certain regions of the DNA is used or suppressed.
The research, now available online, appears Nov. 1 in EMBO reports.
How do you get a two-metre-long DNA thread into the cell nucleus? By winding it into a ball, of course! The DNA is wound around proteins known as histones, becoming 50,000 times shorter as a result. Other proteins then aggregate on it to form chromatin and, finally, the chromosomes. The latter are the product of an ingenious packaging trick. The five types of histones (H1, H2A, H2B, H3 und H4) fulfil even more tasks, however, and this is what makes them so fascinating. Histones can have small chemical attachments, such as acetyl, methyl and phosphate groups, in different places. These cause the opening of the chromatin, for example, and hence enable the genetic information to be read. Conversely, certain areas of the DNA molecule can be deactivated and rendered unreadable through other modifications, such as the binding of proteins. Scientists refer to this process as “gene silencing.” “The histone modifications can intervene in the control of gene activity in this way and, as a result, complement the genetic code,” explains Herbert Jäckle, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen.
Every time a cell divides, this modification pattern of the histones is inherited by the daughter cells. The scientists assume that this epigenetic inheritance is controlled by a cell-specific or organ-specific “histone code.” “This decides whether the cell machinery has access to the DNA-coded genes or whether the access is blocked,” says Jäckle. The scientists would very much like to crack this code: for the production of the histones, hundreds of gene copies are stored in the genome of higher organisms. Therefore, up until now, it appeared to be impossible to switch off these gene copies and replace them with genetically-modified histone variants. Researchers could only create a test system if they managed to do this: if these variants lack certain docking sites, for example for chemical groups, certain modifications to the histones could be prevented and it would then be possible to investigate the extent to which the absence of these modifications leads to diagnosable defects in the organism.
Article Continues -> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101011125957.htm
Researchers Claim Simple White Flower Has World''''s Longest Genome
LONDON — An ordinary-looking white flower from Japan may carry something quite extraordinary within its pale petals – the longest genome ever discovered.
Researchers at London””s Kew Gardens said Thursday they””d discovered that the Paris japonica has a genetic code 50 times longer than that of a human being. The length of that code easily beats its nearest competitor, a long-bodied muck dweller known as the marbled lungfish.
“We were astounded really,” said Ilia Leitch, of Kew””s Jodrell Laboratory.
Leitch and her colleagues suspected the plant might have an larger-than-usual genetic code as its relatives have rather large ones too. But the sheer size of this flower””s genome caught them by surprise. If laid end-to-end it would stretch to more than 300 feet.
“We certainly didn””t expect to find it,” she said.
A genome is the full complement of an organism””s DNA, complex molecules that direct the formation and function of all living organisms. The size of an organism””s genome is typically measured by the number of bases it contains – base pairs being the building blocks of DNA. The human genome, for example, has about 3 million bases and measures about 6 feet in length.
The marbled lungfish has a whopping 130 million bases. And the 12-inch (30-centimeter) flower studied by Leitch turns out to have 150 million.
Outside experts were impressed.
“This is certainly an enormously large genome,” said Nick Lane, a fellow at the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London. “I don””t know of any larger genomes among plants or animals.”
Still, he cautioned that micro-organisms known as amoebas might have even longer codes, saying that the record “might not last long.”
Both Leitch and Lane said the find illustrates the staggering diversity of genome sizes. While Paris japonica and the marbled lungfish have huge ones, other genetic codes are minuscule – the parasite known as Encephalitozoon intestinalis, for example, carries approximately 2,300 bases.
It””s not always clear why the range varies so wildly. Bigger genomes don””t necessarily mean a more complex organism. Whereas genes are generally supposed to correspond to some traits – blonde hair, for example, is genetically determined – in organisms with huge genomes, many genes don””t appear to correspond to anything.
“Effectively, some cells carry massive amounts of ””junk,”” or at least non-coding DNA, whereas others have very little,” Lane said.
Leitch said that geneticists are still discussing the question of why some organisms carry masses of non-coding DNA, and that the study of organisms such as the Paris japonica can help add to the debate.
“It””s a question that””s long intrigued scientists,” she said.
The results of her team””s research are being published in the Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society.
___
Online:
Kew: http://www.kew.org
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/07/paris-japonica-researcher_n_754557.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101007120641.htm
Could Genetically Altered Trees, Plants Help Counter Global Warming?
New research examines the prospects for enhancing biological carbon sequestration through a variety of policy and technical approaches, including the deployment of genetically engineered trees and other plants. (Credit: iStockphoto)
Forests of genetically altered trees and other plants could sequester several billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year and so help ameliorate global warming, according to estimates published in the October issue of BioScience.
The study, by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, outlines a variety of strategies for augmenting the processes that plants use to sequester carbon dioxide from the air and convert it into long-lived forms of carbon, first in vegetation and ultimately in soil.
Besides increasing the efficiency of plants” absorption of light, researchers might be able to genetically alter plants so they send more carbon into their roots–where some may be converted into soil carbon and remain out of circulation for centuries. Other possibilities include altering plants so that they can better withstand the stresses of growing on marginal land, and so that they yield improved bioenergy and food crops. Such innovations might, in combination, boost substantially the amount of carbon that vegetation naturally extracts from air, according to the authors” estimates.
The researchers stress that the use of genetically engineered plants for carbon sequestration is only one of many policy initiatives and technical tools that might boost the carbon sequestration already occurring in natural vegetation and crops.
The article, by Christer Jansson, Stan D. Wullschleger, Udaya C. Kalluri, and Gerald A. Tuskan, is the first in a Special Section in the October BioScience that includes several perspectives on the prospects for enhancing biological carbon sequestration. Other articles in the section analyze the substantial ecological and economic constraints that limit such efforts. One article discusses the prospects for sequestering carbon by culturing algae to produce biofuel feedstocks; one proposes a modification of the current regulatory climate for producing genetically engineered trees in the United States; and one discusses societal perceptions of the issues surrounding the use of genetically altered organisms to ameliorate warming attributed to the buildup of greenhouse gases.
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by American Institute of Biological Sciences, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.
Journal Reference:
- Christer Jansson, Stan D. Wullschleger, Udaya C. Kalluri, and Gerald A. Tuskan. Phytosequestration: Carbon Biosequestration by Plants and the Prospects of Genetic Engineering. BioScience, October 2010
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101001105205.htm
