Enabling trade in Gene-Edited produce in Asia and Australasia: The developing regulatory landscape and future perspectives

Genome- or gene-editing (abbreviated here as ‘GEd’) presents great opportunities for crop improvement. This is especially so for the countries in the Asia-Pacific region, which is home to more than half of the world’s growing population. A brief description of the science of gene-editing is provided with examples of GEd products. For the benefits of GEd technologies to be realized, international policy and regulatory environments must be clarified, otherwise non-tariff trade barriers will result. The status of regulations that relate to GEd crop products in Asian countries and Australasia are described, together with relevant definitions and responsible regulatory bodies. The regulatory landscape is changing rapidly: in some countries, the regulations are clear, in others they are developing, and some countries have yet to develop appropriate policies. There is clearly a need for the harmonization or alignment of GEd regulations in the region: this will promote the path-to-market and enable the benefits of GEd technologies to reach the end-users

Towards progressive regulatory approaches for agricultural applications of animal biotechnology.

Traditional breeding techniques, applied incrementally over thousands of years, have yielded huge benefits in the characteristics of agricultural animals. This is a result of significant, measurable changes to the genomes of those animal species and breeds. Genome editing techniques may now be applied to achieve targeted DNA sequence alterations, with the potential to affect traits of interest to production of agricultural animals in just one generation. New opportunities arise to improve characteristics difficult to achieve or not amenable to traditional breeding, including disease resistance, and traits that can improve animal welfare, reduce environmental impact, or mitigate impacts of climate change. Countries and supranational institutions are in the process of defining regulatory approaches for genome edited animals and can benefit from sharing approaches and experiences to institute progressive policies in which regulatory oversight is scaled to the particular level of risk involved. To facilitate information sharing and discussion on animal biotechnology, an international community of researchers, developers, breeders, regulators, and communicators recently held a series of seven virtual workshop sessions on applications of biotechnology for animal agriculture, food and environmental safety assessment, regulatory approaches, and market and consumer acceptance. In this report, we summarize the topics presented in the workshop sessions, as well as discussions coming out of the breakout sessions. This is framed within the context of past and recent scientific and regulatory developments. This is a pivotal moment for determination of regulatory approaches and establishment of trust across the innovation through-chain, from researchers, developers, regulators, breeders, farmers through to consumers

Wild species of vaccinium composition, nutritional value and utilization

There are still, in many parts of the globe, some edible fruit collects from the wild for human feeding and other uses. These fruits are utilised either in their raw nature or after some form of processing. One of these wild fruits are Vaccinium species such as Vaccinium myrtoides (Blume) Miq., Vaccinium cylindraceum, Vaccinium padifolium, Vaccinium corymbosum, Vaccinium myrtillus and others from the plant family Ericaceae. The term wild infers non-cultivated plants found in plantation felids or the forest. The species Vaccinium myrtoides and the others are small trees (shrubs) that are well known in Southeast Asian countries such as Philippines, Indonesia and other neighbouring islands. The plants classified as wild growing shrubs. However, the locals have made it be fully utilized in some areas as the wood that are used in grafting utensils and cutleries, or as fuel and fruits. The small-sized berry-like fruits with an average diameter of about 4–5 mm turn black when ripe. They have a delicious flavour that makes it edible and used in the making of other delicacies such as tart and pies to add flavour and as preservatives as well. A few published researches were done on Vaccinium myrtoides showing that it is still used in folkloric medicine. Leaves and fruits extracts showed strong antioxidant activity when tested in-vitro using DPPH (2, 2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl) free radical scavenging activity as part of a preliminary phytochemical screening for V. myrtoides. The study revealed that the antioxidant activity is due to the presence of flavonoids and other phenolic compounds in the plant leaves and fruit extracts

Genetic engineering of rice: Agrobacterium tumefaciens-mediated transformation of rice and evaluation of a corn pollen-specific promoter using thegusA gene in transgenic rice

Rice genetic engineering permits access to an unlimited gene pool through the transfer of desirable genes between any two species of interest, irrespective of their evolutionary or taxonomic relationships. However, there are major problems to be considered for a successful foreign gene introgression into rice. Two of the major problems were considered in this thesis: first is the development of an efficient transformation method for foreign gene transfer to rice, and the second is the identification of conditions that will allow expression of the transgene in the proper developmental and tissue-specific manner. Agrobacterium-mediated transformation of rice was studied following reports of its successes in transformation of dicots and its potential in transforming monocots. Conditions for successful Agrobacterium-mediated transformation of rice was studied based on transient GUS expression, including the type and age of explant, preinduction and co-cultivation conditions, acetosyringone concentrations, the media (co-cultivation and selection), the promoter and the Agrobacterium strains. A protocol was etablished which resulted in the production of stably transformed calli at high efficiency (36.1% for Nortai and 5.9% for TCS10) using immature embryos treated with At656 (pCNL56). Transgenic plants were not obtained which may be due to the long duration of exposure of inoculated embryos and calli to high concentrations of G418 during selection. Following reports of Hiei et al. (1994) in obtaining high efficiency of transformed rice plants using scutellar tissue infection with LBA4404 (pTOK233), immature embryos of indica (IR54, IR72, and TCS10) and a japonica variety (Radon) were infected with the same Agrobacterium strain, using the protocol established in this study with minor modifications based on Hiei et al. (1994). Transgenic plants were obtained after hygromycin selection at a high efficiency for Radon (27.0%), and at a lower but acceptable efficiency for TCS10 (0.5% to 1.2%) and IR72 (1.9% to 8.3%). Southern blot analysis of genomic DNA from transgenic Radon, TCS10, and IR72 plants showed very few integration events. Fertility of the T\rm\sb{o} plants was comparable to the seed-derived plants. Progeny analyses of seeds from T\rm\sb{o} plants exhibited a 3:1 ratio of GUS\sp+ to GUS\sp- plants, indicative of gene integration at a single locus. The second major problem addressed was identification of conditions that would allow the expression of a transgene in the proper developmental and tissue-specific manner. This problem was dealt with using the promoter of a corn pollen-specific gene Zmg13 in order to develop a system to genetically engineer rice whose fertility and sterility can be controlled. Rice protoplasts were co-transformed with the plasmid pCPPGUS containing the Zmg13 promoter starting from the $-$260 position in front of the $\beta$-glucuronidase gene, and a bar gene-containing plasmid (p35SBarB) using polyethylene glycol-mediated transformation. Transgenic plants were obtained after selection with phosphinothricin, which produced high selection and co-transformation efficiencies. Transgenic plants exhibited GUS activity in a pollen-specific manner depending on the transgene copy number and the physiological state of the anther/pollen

Building bridges between global information systems on marine organisms and ecosystem models

To facilitate the wider implementation of ecosystem modeling platforms and, thereby, to help advance ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM) worldwide, tools delivering a large quantity of inputs to ecosystem models are needed. We developed a web application providing OSMOSE ecosystem models with values for trophic, growth and reproduction parameters derived from data from two global information systems (FishBase and SeaLifeBase). Our web application guides the user through simple queries to extract information from FishBase and SeaLifeBase data archives, and it delivers all the configuration files necessary for running an OSMOSE model. Here, we present our web application and demonstrate it for the West Florida Shelf ecosystem. Our software architecture can serve as a basis for designing other advanced web applications using FishBase and SeaLifeBase data in support of EBFM