The International Breeder's Rights System and Crop Plant Innovation

Legal arrangements governing a plant breeder's intellectual property rights to his inventions are likely to affect the future of crop research. Such systems, although controversial, are probably currently desirable for the developed world. The new genetic technologies may change this judgment, and certainly require redefinition of the lines between plant patents and regular patents. Several safeguards, present in the United States breeder's rights law, should be applied more broadly. A new safeguard-of ensuring that material be entered into germplasm banks-should be applied everywhere. For the developing world, the desirability of a plant patent system is much less clear; new agreements may be desirable to ensure the free flow and collection of germplasm.     

Focused evolution of HIV-1 neutralizing antibodies revealed by structures and deep sequencing

Antibody VRC01 is a human immunoglobulin that neutralizes about 90% of HIV-1 isolates. To understand how such broadly neutralizing antibodies develop, we used x-ray crystallography and 454 pyrosequencing to characterize additional VRC01-like antibodies from HIV-1-infected individuals. Crystal structures revealed a convergent mode of binding for diverse antibodies to the same CD4-binding-site epitope. A functional genomics analysis of expressed heavy and light chains revealed common pathways of antibody-heavy chain maturation, confined to the IGHV1-2*02 lineage, involving dozens of somatic changes, and capable of pairing with different light chains. Broadly neutralizing HIV-1 immunity associated with VRC01-like antibodies thus involves the evolution of antibodies to a highly affinity-matured state required to recognize an invariant viral structure, with lineages defined from thousands of sequences providing a genetic roadmap of their development.     

Development of gynogenetic eggs in the mouse: implications for parthenogenetic embryos

Mouse eggs with different genetic constitutions were prepared by micromanipulation of fertilized diploids and triploids. The diploid gynogenones, activated by the male gamete which was then removed, developed at best to about the 25-somite stage as did the genetically similar diploid parthenogenones stimulated to develop in the complete absence of the male gamete. The failure of development to term in both cases may be due to homozygosity and does not appear to be due to a lack of extragenetic contribution from spermatozoa.     

Chromosomal speciation and molecular divergence--accelerated evolution in rearranged chromosomes

Humans and their closest evolutionary relatives, the chimpanzees, differ in approximately 1.24% of their genomic DNA sequences. The fraction of these changes accumulated during the speciation processes that have separated the two lineages may be of special relevance in understanding the basis of their differences. We analyzed human and chimpanzee sequence data to search for the patterns of divergence and polymorphism predicted by a theoretical model of speciation. According to the model, positively selected changes should accumulate in chromosomes that present fixed structural differences, such as inversions, between the two species. Protein evolution was more than 2.2 times faster in chromosomes that had undergone structural rearrangements compared with colinear chromosomes. Also, nucleotide variability is slightly lower in rearranged chromosomes. These patterns of divergence and polymorphism may be, at least in part, the molecular footprint of speciation events in the human and chimpanzee lineages.     

华北落叶松鞘蛾性信息素应用技术研究

1999年至2000年,山西省太岳山林局应用人工合成的华北落叶松鞘蛾性信息素对华北落叶松鞘蛾进行了监测,并开展了大量诱杀试验。结果表明,该引诱剂对华北落叶松鞘蛾雄蛾有较强的引诱作用,60个诱捕器在成虫扬飞期共诱到鞘蛾成虫51万头,应用诱捕器后,林地内华北落叶松鞘蛾被害率下降50.1％,虫口密度下降81.2％。可用于对华北落叶松鞘蛾的监测和防治。