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GM maize has built-in SOS chemical
HONGFENG YU/ARGONNE NATIONAL LAB
IN BRIEF Sending out a chemical SOS MAIZE has been genetically engineered to produce a chemical rallying cry for help against the plant’s worst pest in the US. The signal is an odorous chemical called (E)-betacaryophyllene. It attracts nematodes that kill the larvae of the western corn rootworm, responsible for an estimated $1 billion in lost revenue in the US every year. Ted Turlings of the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland and his colleagues inserted a gene from oregano that codes for caryophyllene into maize plants. “We saw a 50 per cent drop in damage to the engineered plants, compared with the controls. It was quite dramatic,” he says. Turlings’s team is now looking into creating super-resistant maize by inserting the gene for caryophyllene into plants that are already engineered to produce the Bt toxin against rootworms.
Here is a supernova I prepared earlier… THE guts of an exploding star can now be visualised almost instantly in glorious detail. Astronomers often use supercomputers to simulate how a supernova evolves, generating vast amounts of data. Seeing their results visually used to involve transferring the data to a normal computer, but this took weeks to generate graphics. “This kind of visualisation allows us to make most of the gas transparent and zero in
on only the most interesting features,” says John Blondin at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Now the supercomputer Blue Gene/P at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois can create visualisations in minutes. The image above shows the first half-second after the collapse of a star’s core, says Blondin. The colours represent the values of the internal energy of the gases. The solid gold, for instance, marks a particularly strong wave. Creating these images so quickly is ”a tremendous breakthrough”, says Robert Fisher of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.
New strain of HIV from gorillas A NEW strain of HIV has jumped from gorillas to humans. So far only one person, a 62-year-old Cameroonian woman living in Paris, France, has been found to be infected with the virus, which closely resembles strains of simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) recently discovered in wild western gorillas. As the infection was unlikely to have been caused by direct gorilla14 | NewScientist | 8 August 2009
to-human transmission, “it would be surprising if there aren’t more human cases”, says David Robertson, a bioinformaticist at the University of Manchester, UK, who was part of the team that analysed the virus (Nature Medicine, DOI: 10.1038/nm.2016). Until 2004, the woman lived in a suburb of Cameroon’s capital city Yaoundé, where she didn’t come into contact with apes or eat
their meat. This means that she probably acquired the infection from another person, likely through sexual contact. She is yet to show any sign of a compromised immune system – the hallmark of AIDS – but tests on lab-cultured human cells suggest that the virus replicates in the same way as other HIV strains. The new virus should also be susceptible to antiretroviral drugs that slow the growth of other strains of HIV, Robertson says.
Epilepsy clue in the metal of mice EPILEPSY may be sparked by a metal imbalance in the brain caused by a single gene mutation. Steven Clapcote’s team at the University of Leeds, UK, found that mice with a mutated copy of the Atp1a3 gene were prone to epileptic seizures, which could be prevented in their offspring by breeding with mice that possessed multiple copies of the normal gene (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.090481706). Clapcote reckons the gene helps regulate sodium and potassium levels in brain nerve cells. A metal imbalance has long been suspected to lead to seizures, he notes. The team is now screening DNA from people with epilepsy to see if human Atp1a3 could be to blame.
IN BRIEF Sending out a chemical SOS MAIZE has been genetically engineered to produce a chemical rallying cry for help against the plant’s worst pest in the US. The signal is an odorous chemical called (E)-betacaryophyllene. It attracts nematodes that kill the larvae of the western corn rootworm, responsible for an estimated $1 billion in lost revenue in the US every year. Ted Turlings of the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland and his colleagues inserted a gene from oregano that codes for caryophyllene into maize plants. “We saw a 50 per cent drop in damage to the engineered plants, compared with the controls. It was quite dramatic,” he says. Turlings’s team is now looking into creating super-resistant maize by inserting the gene for caryophyllene into plants that are already engineered to produce the Bt toxin against rootworms.
Here is a supernova I prepared earlier… THE guts of an exploding star can now be visualised almost instantly in glorious detail. Astronomers often use supercomputers to simulate how a supernova evolves, generating vast amounts of data. Seeing their results visually used to involve transferring the data to a normal computer, but this took weeks to generate graphics. “This kind of visualisation allows us to make most of the gas transparent and zero in
on only the most interesting features,” says John Blondin at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Now the supercomputer Blue Gene/P at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois can create visualisations in minutes. The image above shows the first half-second after the collapse of a star’s core, says Blondin. The colours represent the values of the internal energy of the gases. The solid gold, for instance, marks a particularly strong wave. Creating these images so quickly is ”a tremendous breakthrough”, says Robert Fisher of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.
New strain of HIV from gorillas A NEW strain of HIV has jumped from gorillas to humans. So far only one person, a 62-year-old Cameroonian woman living in Paris, France, has been found to be infected with the virus, which closely resembles strains of simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) recently discovered in wild western gorillas. As the infection was unlikely to have been caused by direct gorilla14 | NewScientist | 8 August 2009
to-human transmission, “it would be surprising if there aren’t more human cases”, says David Robertson, a bioinformaticist at the University of Manchester, UK, who was part of the team that analysed the virus (Nature Medicine, DOI: 10.1038/nm.2016). Until 2004, the woman lived in a suburb of Cameroon’s capital city Yaoundé, where she didn’t come into contact with apes or eat
their meat. This means that she probably acquired the infection from another person, likely through sexual contact. She is yet to show any sign of a compromised immune system – the hallmark of AIDS – but tests on lab-cultured human cells suggest that the virus replicates in the same way as other HIV strains. The new virus should also be susceptible to antiretroviral drugs that slow the growth of other strains of HIV, Robertson says.
Epilepsy clue in the metal of mice EPILEPSY may be sparked by a metal imbalance in the brain caused by a single gene mutation. Steven Clapcote’s team at the University of Leeds, UK, found that mice with a mutated copy of the Atp1a3 gene were prone to epileptic seizures, which could be prevented in their offspring by breeding with mice that possessed multiple copies of the normal gene (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.090481706). Clapcote reckons the gene helps regulate sodium and potassium levels in brain nerve cells. A metal imbalance has long been suspected to lead to seizures, he notes. The team is now screening DNA from people with epilepsy to see if human Atp1a3 could be to blame.