The breakdown of trust in decision making about GM crops in a knowledge deficit

In a society that is becoming increasingly sceptical of scientific innovation, any novel technological advance which has the potential to dramatically alter some aspect of society will face criticism. Biotechnology is no exception. Trust is crucial for its acceptance, as society lacks both broad scientific understanding and specific. biotechnological knowledge. In recent years, society’s trust in science and scientific regulation has been severely dented. Questions of scientific independence and credibility, the negative impacts of previous innovations, and the contrasting views of experts and society, have all played their part in the diminution of society’s trust of scientific innovation, and the capacity of those charged with regulating these innovations. When it comes to regaining trust, one-way dialogue ‘informing’ society of the regulatory steps taken to ensure safety has been shown not to work. We suggest a more inclusive approach, which incorporates societal concerns within the regulatory assessment in a transparent an explicit way, is needed to rebuild societal trust. While the regulatory process only includes the concerns of scientific experts, there will always be criticisms of its scope and the impartiality of experts and the validity of the underlying science

Biological invasions at the gene level

Despite several recent contributions of population and evolutionary biology to the rapidly developing field of invasion biology, integration is far from perfect. I argue here that invasion and native status are sometimes best discussed at the level of the gene rather than at the level of the species. This, and the need to consider both natural (e.g. postglacial) and human-induced invasions, suggests that a more integrative view of invasion biology is require

The evolutionary history of the common chloroplast genome of Arabidopsis thaliana and A. suecica

The evolutionary history of the common chloroplast (cp) genome of the allotetraploid Arabidopsis suecica and its maternal parent A. thaliana was investigated by sequencing 50 fragments of cpDNA, resulting in 98 polymorphic sites. The variation in the A. suecica sample was small, in contrast to that of the A. thaliana sample. The time to the most recent common ancestor (T(MRCA)) of the A. suecica cp genome alone was estimated to be about one 37th of the T(MRCA) of both the A. thaliana and A. suecica cp genomes. This corresponds to A. suecica having a MRCA between 10 000 and 50 000 years ago, suggesting that the entire species originated during, or before, this period of time, although the estimates are sensitive to assumptions made about population size and mutation rate. The data was also consistent with the hypothesis of A. suecica being of single origin. Isolation-by-distance and population structure in A. thaliana depended upon the geographical scale analysed; isolation-by-distance was found to be weak on the global scale but locally pronounced. Within the genealogical cp tree of A. thaliana, there were indications that the root of the A. suecica species is located among accessions of A. thaliana that come primarily from central Europe. Selective neutrality of the cp genome could not be rejected, despite the fact that it contains several completely linked protein-coding genes