Plant Sciences

91  En septembre, les étudiants feront leur première rentrée officielle dans le nouveau campus Paris-Saclay (Essonne). Le décret créant de ce...

Seventeen new genetically modified food products will be authorised for import to Europe before the end of May in a significant acceleration of biotech trade, the Guardian has learned.

An announcement could be made as early as next week, sources said, when a meeting of EU commissioners has been pencilled in to review adoption of new rules for approving GM imports.

Europe currently imports around 58 GM products from abroad, mostly US maize, cotton, soy bean and sugar beet.
GM crops to be fast-tracked in UK following EU vote
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But Greenpeace said that the US has raised the issue of a large logjam in biotech authorisations in talks over a free trade deal known as TTIP.

“With transatlantic trade talks ongoing, pressure has been mounting from the biotech industry and the US government to break open the EU market to GM imports and to speed up authorisation procedures,” Marco Contiero, Greenpeace EU’s agriculture director, told the Guardian. “The possible authorisation of 17 GM crops by the commission in the next few days is a likely result of this pressure.”

“The timing is still being discussed but it is just a question of internal procedure now,” a source familiar with the discussions told the Guardian. “It is clear that the 17 strains will be authorised at the same time as the review meeting or just after. I would say it will happen before the end of May for sure.”

Under proposed new GM import rules seen by the Guardian, future authorisations would automatically follow approval of new strains by the European Food and Safety Agency (Efsa). Individual countries would be given a similar opt-out to the one agreed for GM cultivation in a law passed earlier this year.
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“It will be up to each member state wanting to make use of this ‘opt-out’ to develop this justification on a case-by-case basis, taking into account the GMO [genetically-modified organism] in question, the type of measure envisaged and the specific circumstances at national or regional level that can justify such an opt-out,” the draft said.

Opposition from some EU states to draft GM authorisations is “usually not based on science but on other considerations reflecting the societal debate existing in the country,” the commission argues. So opt-outs will not be granted to EU states who seek it on health or environmental grounds, after Efsa has deemed a product safe.

Nice combination of QTL mapping and gene expression analysis to identify new genes involved in drought response. From this approach, the authors "produced ranked lists of candidate genes for several drought-associated traits, including water use efficiency, growth, abscisic acid concentration (ABA), and proline concentration."

(via T. Lahaye, thx)

Shan et al, 2015

Fragrant rice is favoured worldwide because of its agreeable scent. The presence of a defective badh2 allele encoding betaine aldehyde dehydrogenase (BADH2) results in the synthesis of 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (2AP), which is a major fragrance compound. Here, transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs) were engineered to target and disrupt the OsBADH2 gene. Six heterozygous mutants (30%) were recovered from 20 transgenic hygromycin-resistant lines. Sanger sequencing confirmed that these lines had various indel mutations at the TALEN target site. All six transmitted the BADH2 mutations to the T1 generation; and four T1 mutant lines tested also efficiently transmitted the mutations to the T2 generation. Mutant plants carrying only the desired DNA sequence change but not the TALEN transgene were obtained by segregation in the T1 and T2 generations. The 2AP content of rice grains of the T1 lines with homozygous mutations increased from 0 to 0.35–0.75 mg/kg, which was similar to the content of a positive control variety harbouring the badh2-E7 mutation. We also simultaneously introduced three different pairs of TALENs targeting three separate rice genes into rice cells by bombardment and obtained lines with mutations in one, two and all three genes. These results indicate that targeted mutagenesis using TALENs is a useful approach to creating important agronomic traits.

"We communicate the rather remarkable observation that among 291 tested accessions of cultivated sweet potato, all contain one or more transfer DNA (T-DNA) sequences. These sequences, which are shown to be expressed in a cultivated sweet potato clone (“Huachano”) that was analyzed in detail, suggest that an Agrobacterium infection occurred in evolutionary times. One of the T-DNAs is apparently present in all cultivated sweet potato clones, but not in the crop’s closely related wild relatives, suggesting the T-DNA provided a trait or traits that were selected for during domestication. This finding draws attention to the importance of plant–microbe interactions, and given that this crop has been eaten for millennia, it may change the paradigm governing the “unnatural” status of transgenic crops. "