The US and the EU may have put on a joint face at this month’s collapsed World Trade Organisation talks in Mexico, but disputes between them over genetically modified crops are deepening. Italy won the right to impose an emergency ban on genetically modified food products when Europe’s highest court intervened in the bitter dispute between Rome and US biotechnology companies. But Italy’s victor...

Biotechnology is a vital issue that impacts all of us. Development of genetically modified organisms is one of the highest achievements of this technology. It is being released throughout our environment and deployed with superficial or no risk assessments about its matchless powers to harm life. Within the next few years, many types of transgenic commodities will be ready for commercialization...

biotechnology is providing us with a wide range of options for how we can use agricultural and commercial forestry lands. the cultivation of genetically modified (gm) crops on millions of hectares of lands and their injection into our food chain is a huge global genetic experiment involving all living beings. considering the fast pace of new advances in production of genetically modified crops,...

Biotech crops are the fastest adopted crop technology in the history of modern agriculture. The commercialisation of GMO is in many countries strictly regulated laying down the need for traceability and labelling. To comply with these legislations, detection methods are needed. To date, GM events have been developed by the introduction of a transgenic insert (i.e., promoter, coding sequence, te...

Global agriculture finds itself engrossed in a heated debate over genetically modified (GM) crops. This debate, which features science, economics, politics, and even religion, is taking place almost everywhere. It is going on in research labs, corporate boardrooms, legislative chambers, newspaper editorial offices, religious institutions, schools, supermarkets, coffee shops, and even in private...

In the coming years, the frequency of unauthorised genetically modified organisms (GMOs) being present in the European food and feed chain will increase significantly. Therefore, we have developed a strategy to identify unauthorised GMOs containing a pCAMBIA family vector, frequently present in transgenic plants. This integrated approach is performed in two successive steps on Bt rice grains. F...

The implication of molecular biology in crop improvement is now more than three decades old. Not surprisingly, technology has moved on, and there are a number of new techniques that may or may not come under the genetically modified (GM) banner and, therefore, GM regulations. In cisgenic technology, cisgenes from crossable plants are used and it is a single procedure of gene introduction whereb...

The rapid increase in the number of genetically modified (GM) varieties has led to a demand for high-throughput methods to detect genetically modified organisms (GMOs). We describe a new dynamic array-based high throughput method to simultaneously detect 48 targets in 48 samples on a Fludigm system. The test targets included species-specific genes, common screening elements, most of the Chinese...

Two new 5-oxomilbemycins, 27-aldehyde-5-oxomilbemycin β12 (1) and 2-hydroxymilbemycin K (2), were isolated from a genetically engineered strain Streptomyces bingchenggensis BCJ60. Their structures were determined by comprehensive analyses of its 1 H and 13 C NMR, COSY, HMQC, and HMBC spectroscopic, HRESI-MS mass spectrometric and comparison with data from the literature. Preliminary studies sho...