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Fluorescent pet rabbit fuels GM debate
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News & Comment
TRENDS in Cell Biology Vol.11 No.1 January 2001
In Brief
Advanced genomics promise fruit fly exposure
around the world to develop more comprehensive arrays. Its current arrays were developed using a collection of Drosophila cDNAs created by the Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project. [M.T.]
UK BSE inquiry
Geneticists in Cambridge, UK, are setting up one of Europe’s most advanced centers for studying how genes are expressed in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. The center will compare DNA samples from the 70 or so fly laboratories around the UK, or elsewhere, with stored fragments of the Drosophila genome, some of which contain carefully constructed mutations, to provide exquisitely sensitive profiles of gene expression. The profiles will detail which genes are expressed, when and under what conditions. They will allow researchers to look for changes in gene expression that occur, for example, over a particular developmental period or as a result of some mutation. At the heart of the center is a robotic production line that turns out microarrays spotted with samples of Drosophila DNA. Researchers will be able to use the facility like a ‘black box,’ says Steve Russell, leader of the group running the UK Drosophila Functional Genomics Facility at the University of Cambridge. ‘But we will also be offering training on the use of these technologies.’ A related proteomics facility, also funded out of the £3.5 million grant from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) being used to establish the genomics site, will similarly identify and classify proteins derived from the Drosophila genome. The proteomics facility will also support geneticists working on Arabidopsis, a widely used plant model organism. The center plans to make all its genomics and proteomics data freely accessible on the Web, as and when the information becomes available. It is also developing open-source software, in collaboration with physicists and mathematicians, to analyze the huge volume of data that the project will produce. Russell says the center aims to broaden its links to other fly laboratories http://tcb.trends.com
With the numbers of casualties of variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob (vCJD) disease still rising in the UK, an independent investigation has been published on the history of the occurrence of the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) epidemic, its link to vCJD and the action taken in response to it (see http://62.189.42.105/index.htm). Feeding the remains of infected animals to cattle fueled the outbreak of ‘mad cow disease’ in the 1980s and early 1990s. The link to vCJD became apparent when the disease affected people of under 45 years of age. According to the report, proper measures were taken to prevent the BSE epidemic from spreading, but the government should have applied even stricter slaughterhouse rules based on accumulating scientific evidence that BSE is causally linked to vCJD. Instead, politicians believed that the risks posed by BSE were remote. They were too busy preventing panic in the public when they bagatelled the risk of BSE spreading from cattle to man. As a consequence, public confidence in the objective judgement of the government may have been damaged. In the future, it is clear that caution will be required in establishing policy on topics, such as the acceptance of GM food or the use of pig organs for transplants, where scientific evidence plays a role in the decision-making process. [J.d.B.]
Fluorescent pet rabbit fuels GM debate The arguments about the applications of GM technology rage on, and now USbased artist Eduardo Kac has caused a further media stir through his recent explorations in ‘transgenic art’. His first such work, displayed in 1999, featured Escherichia coli transformed with genes encoding jellyfish green-fluorescent protein (GFP) derivatives. He also proposed the making of a transgenic dog, to be christened GFP-K9. An editorial in Nature Biotechnology (October 1999)
suggested that this work could help promote the sensible discussion of GM issues, despite the obvious potential for trivialization. Now, instead of GFP-K9, a rabbit expressing GFP has been successfully made in collaboration with scientists in France, which Kac wants to take home as a family pet. The future for ‘GFP Bunny’ is unclear, owing to the legal issues regarding the release of such an organism. This has provoked another editorial, this time in the Boston Sunday Globe (24 September 2000), which seriously questions the wisdom of making transgenic animals for nonscientific endeavors. Whatever the case, Kac has certainly added some new spice to the debate about the role of genetically modified organisms in society. Check out www.ekac.org for more details. [S.L.]
Presidential awards On 23 October 2000, President Clinton named 59 young US researchers as recipients of the fifth annual Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). These awards are the highest honour bestowed by the United States government on young professionals at the outset of their independent research careers. Awardees include Orna Cohen-Fix, a cell biologist at the NIH Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology, NIDDK, who studies cell-cycle regulation in budding yeast and Michael Dustin of the Molecular Cell Biology Program at Washington University, St Louis, who is investigating regulated cell adhesion of lymphocytes. [D.S.]
New institute in Dresden Germany’s Max Planck Society has established a new institute in the former eastern part of the country, in Dresden. The Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) will provide a specific focus for the study of cell organization and function in both developing and adult organisms. A new building will house the facilities and will be run under the Executive Directorship of Kai Simons, formerly of the Cell Biology and Biophysics Programme at EMBL in Heidelberg. Other EMBL alumni making the move to Dresden include Marino Zerial, Tony Hyman and Wieland Huttner.
News & Comment
TRENDS in Cell Biology Vol.11 No.1 January 2001
In Brief
Advanced genomics promise fruit fly exposure
around the world to develop more comprehensive arrays. Its current arrays were developed using a collection of Drosophila cDNAs created by the Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project. [M.T.]
UK BSE inquiry
Geneticists in Cambridge, UK, are setting up one of Europe’s most advanced centers for studying how genes are expressed in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. The center will compare DNA samples from the 70 or so fly laboratories around the UK, or elsewhere, with stored fragments of the Drosophila genome, some of which contain carefully constructed mutations, to provide exquisitely sensitive profiles of gene expression. The profiles will detail which genes are expressed, when and under what conditions. They will allow researchers to look for changes in gene expression that occur, for example, over a particular developmental period or as a result of some mutation. At the heart of the center is a robotic production line that turns out microarrays spotted with samples of Drosophila DNA. Researchers will be able to use the facility like a ‘black box,’ says Steve Russell, leader of the group running the UK Drosophila Functional Genomics Facility at the University of Cambridge. ‘But we will also be offering training on the use of these technologies.’ A related proteomics facility, also funded out of the £3.5 million grant from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) being used to establish the genomics site, will similarly identify and classify proteins derived from the Drosophila genome. The proteomics facility will also support geneticists working on Arabidopsis, a widely used plant model organism. The center plans to make all its genomics and proteomics data freely accessible on the Web, as and when the information becomes available. It is also developing open-source software, in collaboration with physicists and mathematicians, to analyze the huge volume of data that the project will produce. Russell says the center aims to broaden its links to other fly laboratories http://tcb.trends.com
With the numbers of casualties of variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob (vCJD) disease still rising in the UK, an independent investigation has been published on the history of the occurrence of the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) epidemic, its link to vCJD and the action taken in response to it (see http://62.189.42.105/index.htm). Feeding the remains of infected animals to cattle fueled the outbreak of ‘mad cow disease’ in the 1980s and early 1990s. The link to vCJD became apparent when the disease affected people of under 45 years of age. According to the report, proper measures were taken to prevent the BSE epidemic from spreading, but the government should have applied even stricter slaughterhouse rules based on accumulating scientific evidence that BSE is causally linked to vCJD. Instead, politicians believed that the risks posed by BSE were remote. They were too busy preventing panic in the public when they bagatelled the risk of BSE spreading from cattle to man. As a consequence, public confidence in the objective judgement of the government may have been damaged. In the future, it is clear that caution will be required in establishing policy on topics, such as the acceptance of GM food or the use of pig organs for transplants, where scientific evidence plays a role in the decision-making process. [J.d.B.]
Fluorescent pet rabbit fuels GM debate The arguments about the applications of GM technology rage on, and now USbased artist Eduardo Kac has caused a further media stir through his recent explorations in ‘transgenic art’. His first such work, displayed in 1999, featured Escherichia coli transformed with genes encoding jellyfish green-fluorescent protein (GFP) derivatives. He also proposed the making of a transgenic dog, to be christened GFP-K9. An editorial in Nature Biotechnology (October 1999)
suggested that this work could help promote the sensible discussion of GM issues, despite the obvious potential for trivialization. Now, instead of GFP-K9, a rabbit expressing GFP has been successfully made in collaboration with scientists in France, which Kac wants to take home as a family pet. The future for ‘GFP Bunny’ is unclear, owing to the legal issues regarding the release of such an organism. This has provoked another editorial, this time in the Boston Sunday Globe (24 September 2000), which seriously questions the wisdom of making transgenic animals for nonscientific endeavors. Whatever the case, Kac has certainly added some new spice to the debate about the role of genetically modified organisms in society. Check out www.ekac.org for more details. [S.L.]
Presidential awards On 23 October 2000, President Clinton named 59 young US researchers as recipients of the fifth annual Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). These awards are the highest honour bestowed by the United States government on young professionals at the outset of their independent research careers. Awardees include Orna Cohen-Fix, a cell biologist at the NIH Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology, NIDDK, who studies cell-cycle regulation in budding yeast and Michael Dustin of the Molecular Cell Biology Program at Washington University, St Louis, who is investigating regulated cell adhesion of lymphocytes. [D.S.]
New institute in Dresden Germany’s Max Planck Society has established a new institute in the former eastern part of the country, in Dresden. The Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) will provide a specific focus for the study of cell organization and function in both developing and adult organisms. A new building will house the facilities and will be run under the Executive Directorship of Kai Simons, formerly of the Cell Biology and Biophysics Programme at EMBL in Heidelberg. Other EMBL alumni making the move to Dresden include Marino Zerial, Tony Hyman and Wieland Huttner.