A review of knowledge of the potential impacts of GMOs on organic agriculture

The organic movement believes that organic agriculture, by its nature, cannot involve the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). This has been incorporated into EU regulations which state that there is no place in organic agriculture for GMOs. The aim in this review is to consider the ways in which the use of GMOs in agriculture in the UK and internationally might impact on organic farming. It does not address the controversy about the rights or wrongs of GMO’s per se. The subjects covered are based on a set of questions raised at the beginning of the study. The review is based primarily on evidence from peer-reviewed literature. The report is based on a number of themes, as follows: • Fate of DNA in soil • Fate of DNA in livestock feed and possible impact of GM feed • Fate of DNA in slurry, manure, compost and mulch • Impact of herbicide tolerant crops • Impact of pest and disease resistant crops • Safety of promoters • DNA transfer in pollen and seeds • Horizontal gene transfer • Impact of scale The report’s Executive Summary includes summaries of the findings on each of these themes

COEL: A Web-based Chemistry Simulation Framework

The chemical reaction network (CRN) is a widely used formalism to describe macroscopic behavior of chemical systems. Available tools for CRN modelling and simulation require local access, installation, and often involve local file storage, which is susceptible to loss, lacks searchable structure, and does not support concurrency. Furthermore, simulations are often single-threaded, and user interfaces are non-trivial to use. Therefore there are significant hurdles to conducting efficient and collaborative chemical research. In this paper, we introduce a new enterprise chemistry simulation framework, COEL, which addresses these issues. COEL is the first web-based framework of its kind. A visually pleasing and intuitive user interface, simulations that run on a large computational grid, reliable database storage, and transactional services make COEL ideal for collaborative research and education. COEL's most prominent features include ODE-based simulations of chemical reaction networks and multicompartment reaction networks, with rich options for user interactions with those networks. COEL provides DNA-strand displacement transformations and visualization (and is to our knowledge the first CRN framework to do so), GA optimization of rate constants, expression validation, an application-wide plotting engine, and SBML/Octave/Matlab export. We also present an overview of the underlying software and technologies employed and describe the main architectural decisions driving our development. COEL is available at http://coel-sim.org for selected research teams only. We plan to provide a part of COEL's functionality to the general public in the near future.Comment: 23 pages, 12 figures, 1 tabl

PROSET — A Language for Prototyping with Sets

We discuss the prototyping language PROSET(Prototyping with Sets) as a language for experimental and evolutionary prototyping, focusing its attention on algorithm design. Some of PROSET’s features include generative communication, flexible exception handling and the integration of persistence. A discussion of some issues pertaining to the compiler and the programming environment conclude the pape