Genetically Modified Pollen Travels Frighteningly Far
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Bioengineered plants can sow their genes over many kilometers in just a single season, according to a new study. The findings give ammunition to those concerned about modified genes contaminating wild populations.
In the study, Lidia Watrud and colleagues at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency monitored a field planted in creeping bentgrass with genes conferring resistance to the herbicide Roundup. Planters of sentinel grasses were placed several kilometers away from the field. After pollination season, the experimenters collected both wild and sentinel seedlings sprouting in a radius of several kilometers and treated them all with Roundup. Those that survived were checked for the presence of the modified gene.
The scientists report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that many of the seedlings growing within a two kilometer radius of the field were contaminated with the modified gene. More worrisome still, wild grasses up to 14 kilometers away from the field and potted sentinel plants up to 21 kilometers downwind produced transgenic seed as well.
High Altitude Human Evolution
An example of human evolution in action has turned up amid the thin air of the Himalayas. A gene that improves oxygen-carrying capacity is spreading with surprising rapidity through Tibetan communities.
Cynthia Beall of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, studied the survival of Tibetan infants living above 4,000 meters. The researchers interviewed thousands of villagers living at high altitudes to obtain their pregnancy histories and reconstruct their family trees. The researchers then estimated the oxygen concentration in the blood of each person using a noninvasive technique often used in hospitals.
Taking into account factors such as age, smoking habits, and illness, the scientists found some families tended to carry up to 10 percent more oxygen in their blood than others. Women with high oxygen levels lost an average of 0.4 children before age 15, compared to 2.5 child deaths among women with normal oxygen levels. Inheritance patterns suggest the trait is carried by a single gene, although no one is sure how it works. But given the trait's selective advantage for survival, researchers report in the journal Nature that the gene should spread throughout the Tibetan population within 2,000 years.
Genetically Modified Pollen Travels Frighteningly Far: BBC / Scientific American
High Altitude Human Evolution: Nature News
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