chadn737

Its also a bit ironic or rather coincidental that you should focus on South Africa. I spent some time working in South Africa's CSIR (a government research institute) making GMOs in maize and tobacco with the specific aim of producing cheap and storable antibodies and microbiocides for HIV. Which everyone should know is ravaging Africa. I was very close to other researchers there working on producing vitamin A enriched maize and sorghum. So the policies of that country, its research, and current status are near and dear to my heart. Let me put in a promotion for this amazing woman, Dr. Rachel Chikwamba, whom I had the honor of working under. She is certainly one of South Africa's foremost (if not the foremost) expert on plant biotechnology. So let it be known...especially to overtone, just how much GMOs are not simply a matter of large corporations or things like Bt or herbicide resistance, since that is all he seems familiar with. There are research efforts all across the world in government labs, in private charitable organizations (vitamin A research in maize and sorghum in those countries is funded by the Gates Foundation) and in in University labs. Unfortunately, fear mongering and anti-corporatism leads to universal opposition of GMOs and harms such research that focuses on alleviating the suffering of hundreds of millions. That is the dark underbelly of the GMO-fearmongering machine which ironically produces millions of dollars for large corporations and organizations that feed off such fearmongering.

Its honestly hard to know because of recombination. In theory, the odds are that you are 1/4 the genetic makeup of any grandparent...but that is the probability of this occurring. In reality, the percentage that you inherit from your grandparents will vary, as will what you inherit from your great grandparents, great great grandparents, etc. These are also complex traits, which makes the situation even more complex. Plus there is population structure, its not the case that certain alleles are exclusive to certain populations.

Interesting report on the environmental and economic benefits of GMOs...let me highlight one of the main points: "Farmers in developing countries received $3.74 for each dollar invested in GM crop seeds in 2012" http://www.pgeconomics.co.uk/page/36/-gm-crop-use-continues-to-benefit-the-environment-and-farmers For those farmers in developing countries with access to GMOs, this is a game changer, a way to increase profits, increase livelihood, and find your way out of poverty.

On what basis does one assume that poor farmers would not have access to GMOs or that higher yields hurt small farmers? The former has not been the case where GMOs are made available to poor farmers (India for example) and the latter simply does not make sense. If poor farmers subsistence farmers are able to produce more, then that provides more income and food stability.

Not if you share the same father. Most of the Y-chromosome does not undergo recombination, except for a very small region at one end. This suppression of recombination ensures that the Y-chromosome remains intact through lineages. Furthermore, since you inherited it only from your father, there is only one "sequence" that you can inherit. The reason why the rest of the genome can vary is that both your parents have two copies of each chromosome derived from two different parents. The exception to this is the Y-chromosome.

Thats false. I know that in the past I linked you to at least one study from the early 90s (when these crops were first being evaluated and commercialized) that directly looked at the potential effects on honey bees. There are many others from this same time period: 1) Bacillus thuringiensis var. kurstaki [CryIA ©] protein expressed in transgenic cotton: effects on beneficial and other non-target insects 2) Effects of a Bacillus thuringiensis toxin, two Bacillus thuringiensis biopesticide formulations, and a soybean trypsin inhibitor on honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) survival and food consumption 3) Impatto ecologico di piante transgeniche-Bt [bacillus thuringiensis]. 1: Verifica dei possibili effetti della tossina CryIIIB su colonie di api domestiche (Apis mellifera L.) 4) Safety Assessment of Insect-Protected Corn Ironically, since Bt has long been used as a sprayed-on pesticide and still is by organic farmers, there have been studies of its environmental effects, specifically on bees going back even before the development of GMOs or apart from their effects as GMOs. 5) Environmental and Health Impacts of Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis (Look at table 3 which lists a massive number of studies looking at effects on non-target species...some studies going back to 1980). So we know that there has been numerous studies on the effects of Bt before, during, and after the development of Bt crops. Many studies looking specifically at the effects on honey bees. These studies continue to this day: 6) A Meta-Analysis of Effects of Bt Crops on Honey Bees (Hymenoptera: Apidae) 7) Effects of Cry1Ab protoxin, deltamethrin and imidacloprid on the foraging activity and the learning performances of the honeybee Apis mellifera, a comparative approach 8) Contact and oral toxicity to honey bees (Apis mellifera) of agents registered for use for sweet corn insect control in Ontario, Canada 9) The oral toxicity of the transgenic Bt+CpTI cotton pollen to honeybees (Apis mellifera) 10) Bacterial community structures in honeybee intestines and their response to two insecticidal proteins I could give you many more studies....time and again, no significant impact is found. To suggest that there is an association between Bt and colony collapse disorder or that we did not know the effects of Bt then or now flies in the face of a large body of research. In fact the major culprit appears to be Varroa destructor, a parasitic mite. You keep making these vague unsubstantiated claims trying to implicate GMOs, yet all the research argues the exact opposite. This is a science forum, not a conspiracy theorist forum. Lets base our conclusions on hard scientific data, not vague suggestions and conspiracy theories. Also false. You are confusing correlation with causation. The basis of increased corn and soybean acreage is the increased demand for these products, driven primarily by government mandated ethanol requirements. This has led to rapid increases in corn prices, making it more profitable to grow corn even on mariginal land. Ethanol-fueled corn boom advances conversion of prairie potholes -- study Ethanol destroys prairies That these crops happen to be GMOs is merely coincidence, not causative. Again, you are making unsubstantiated claims trying to implicate GMOs as harmful, when the facts say the exact opposite.

The problem is....does this control for actual caloric intake? People who are vegetarians or vegans are often much more conscious of how much they eat, what they eat, exercise more often, etc. If you simply take non-vegetarians as a general group, then you will have everything from those who eat healthy well-balanced meals that include meat to those who eat nothing but McDonalds and 5000 calories a day. That is going to bias the results and thus falsely attribute the real cause (total calories, lack of exercise, etc) to the eating of certain products. This is why we have the old statistics adage of "correlation does not equal causation". EDIT: I read the actual study. Adjustment is made for physical activity, but not for actual calories ate or what exactly was ate. If you have individuals eating 5000 calories of day in one data set, thus skewing the results, then one would incorrectly find a correlation with meat-eating rather than simple caloric uptake.

There are probably more elegant solutions, but the first that comes to mind: Crosslink and do pull downs for each of your three proteins. Then probe with an antibodies for the other two proteins. So say you do a pull-down with A. Probe then with an antibody for B and then with an antibody for C. If you see a signal for B, but not C or if you see signals for B and C at different size ranges, then that would suggest a mutually exclusive interaction. If you see a signal for both at the same size range, then it suggests a complex.

That is a difficult question...how do you define an ecosystem as a whole and the harm done to it? I come from Iowa, where my family farms. Nearly the entire state was under cultivation and the ecosystem permanently altered long before GMOs. Ecosystems are in constant flux and I'm not sure how one would even go about determining harm to the system as a "whole", unless it constituted complete die-off, massive extinctions, or something else drastic, like desertification. None of these are even reasonable effects of GMOs. The hypothetical harm of GMOs in an ecosystem...and lets keep in mind that this is hypothetical...are more targeted to a handful of species. Fears of "gene flow" are valid, but they are not limited to GMOs. One of the worst weeds of Sugar beet in Europe (and growing in the US) is weed beet. There is extensive hybridization between domesticated sugar beet and weed beet which contributes to the weediness of weed beets. All of this occurs outside of the context of GMOs. So when I hear arguments of the risk of gene flow made against GMOs, I recognize them as valid to an extent, but I also find this argument to be a nonstarter. That is because the risk is a general one of all domestication and life in general. So the problem is a much bigger one of agriculture as a whole and the simple fact is that the risk is still as real whether one uses traditional breeding or GMOs. Gene flow and hybridization will occur under organic production as well as conventional production. There is no "innocent" or "harmless" way to produce food....at least not in the sense that many anti-GMO advocates and environmentalists envisage. I increasingly hear such phrases as "species barrier" and other nonsense used in the context of these debates. All which suggests that a lot of opponents have an unrealistic sense of evolution, of nature, of agriculture, and its purity. Each GMO must be evaluated separately for its environmental risks and that is done. The EPA and USDA are pretty strict about this. Ironically, no such risk assessments are conducted for crops produced by traditional breeding or mutagenesis, all of which pose the same risks and all of which are acceptable by organic standards. Thats why I view GMOs as the "safest" crops.

Exactly. I've pointed out the many flaws of this study to overtone before and it seems he has forgotten them. Its rather amazing that rats fed higher doses of direct roundup in their water actually lived longer! That is completely contradictory to basic toxicology, which states that "the dose makes the poison". As for the number of animals....the minimal number of animals used in a study depends on the type of study. Studies of carcinogenicity require larger number of animals than normal toxicology studies. The line of rat in such studies also makes a huge difference, particularly when using lines that are known to have an incidence of tumors of 80% under control conditions. All the scientific flaws, which are numerous in this study have been exposed. One cannot draw any valid scientific conclusion from such a flawed study. Then there are the ethical violations of keeping tumor filled rats alive longer than what ethical standards ask in order to generate sensationalist photos. There is also a very real conflict of interest at work here. The paper was held under embargo while hyping up the press and released in timing with the publication of Seralini's book and production of a movie. How people can continue to defend Seralini or his work in light of the facts is beyond me.

1) What do you want to do long term? 2) While your major will have a set of core classes, there is almost always flexibility in what you can take....at least in the US. As an undergraduate, my major was Agronomy (crops and soils). However, after my first year, I knew that my passion was in genetics, so I began taking more classes in genetics, biochemistry, etc than was required by my major. I could have switched, but am actually glad I didn't as my major gave me a background in subjects that are important to my career, but which were not required of a genetics major. The point being, that the major itself is not going to set you on a singular path. If you want to go to grad school, then its not going to be that big of a deal if your major was biology or microbiology. Oftentimes several specialized immunology courses are part of the microbiology curriculum...some only at the graduate level. If your school has these, see if you can't take some as an elective. Even as an undergrad, if you are advanced enough, its possible to take graduate level courses. So look into that as well.

It doesn't induce flowering. Phosphate is an essential nutrient, regardless of what stage of development, but that does not mean it "induces" the production of fruit or flowering. Rather, lack of phosphate will have global effects on metabolism and development. Plants lacking phosphate may abort flowers or not produce fruit simply because it does not have sufficient nutrients to produce the fruit. But phosphate is not in itself a "signal" that will induce flowering or fruiting.

At what level?

Our intelligence allows us to control, eliminate, and even direct the evolution of other species.

Percentage cover? Of what?

If one half are daughters correct.

I meant the affected grandmother and the unaffected Uncle. I counted that wrong yesterday. Yes. In an X-linked recessive disease, any sons of an affected Mother will have the disease. The Y-chromosome does not compensate for this. If this disease were X-linked then the Uncle should be affected. That he is not means it is autosomal.

Its not X-linked. The key is here: "Healthy brother has an affected sister. They have an affected father and a healthy mother. The affected father has a healthy sister. They are the result of healthy parents. The mother has a healthy brother. They are the result of a healthy father and an affected mother." Males, remember have only a single X-chromosome in normal circumstances and they get it from the mother. You are right, this is a recessive trait, which means that the great-grandmother has two copies of the disease causing allele. If it were X-linked, the grandmother's brother would be affected as it is almost certain he would get a disease causing allele.

Why is the answer an alignment of an entirely different sequence? Something has to be missing from this question.

Some of those are mutagenic.

You still haven't shown that such a study actually exists. Your reference a source that mentions an unreferenced study. Where is the actual study? What journal was it published in? Who were the authors? What is the actual data?

That is way to vague. Percentage of what?

This is not a study. What Journal was it published in? Where is the data? This is pseudoscientific nonsense.

Evolution acts on what is heritable. Certainly it acts on genes and arguably it acts on cultural transmission as well (although this is more controversial). Much of our behavior is genetic. It has often been observed that in adult hood, many traits tend to be more heritable, suggesting that environmental influences have a decreasing impact.

You should check out the work of Dave Nelson. He works on the molecular mechanisms of these pathways which induce germination. To summarize, there are chemicals in smoke called karrikins which signal through the same genetic pathways as strigolactones (a plant hormone). You would actually be able to mimic the effect by germinating seeds on media containing karrikins.