The future of plant biotechnology in a globalized and environmentally endangered world

This paper draws on the importance of science-based agriculture in order to throw light on the way scientific achievements are at the basis of modern civilization. An overview of literature on plant biotechnology innovations and the need to steer agriculture towards sustainability introduces a series of perspectives on how plant biotech can contribute to the major challenge of feeding our super population with enough nutritious food without further compromise of the environment. The paper argues that science alone will not solve problems. Three major forces - science, the economy and society - shape our modern world. There is a need for a new social contract to harmonize these forces. The deployment of the technologies must be done on the basis of ethical and moral values

Science, ideology and daily life

Despite years of scientific effort to develop useful and safe biotech crops, ideologies have prevailed and genetically modified (GM-)crops have still not been fully accepted by today's society. This leads one to reflect on the role of Science in society, on what makes scientists credible, and how scientists themselves understand the world we live in. While Science remains a black box for many of the uninitiated, scientists themselves are also generally less-interested in sociology or the economy, such that the coevolution of science and daily life is often frustrated by incomprehension or even disinterest on both sides

PlantCARE, a plant cis-acting regulatory element database

PlantCARE is a database of plant cis-acting regulatory elements, enhancers and repressors. Besides the transcription motifs found on a sequence, it also offers a link to the EMBL entry that contains the full gene sequence as well as a description of the conditions in which a motif becomes functional. The information on these sites is given by matrices, consensus and individual site sequences on particular genes, depending on the available information

Nucleotide sequence and mutational analysis of an immunity repressor gene from Bacillus subtilis temperate phage ϕ105

We have identified and sequenced a bacteriophage phi 105 gene encoding an immunity repressor, the first to be characterized from a temperate phage infecting a Gram-positive host. Using superinfection immunity as an assay for repressor function, the phi 105 repressor gene was located within a 740-bp PvuII-HindIII subfragment near the left end of the phi 105 EcoRI-F fragment. We show that the repressor is specified by the 5'-proximal coding sequence of a translationally overlapping gene pair, transcribed from right to left on the conventional phi 105 map. Comparison of its amino acid sequence (146 residues) with that of a large number of Gram-negative bacterial and phage repressors revealed a putative DNA-binding region between positions 20 and 39. The coding region is preceded by a strong Shine-Dalgarno sequence 5' AAAGGAG 3'. Deletion analysis of the 5'-flanking DNA allowed to identify transcriptional control elements. Their structure, 5' TTGTAT 3' at -35 and 5' TATAAT 3' at -10, strongly suggests that the phi 105 repressor gene is transcribed by the major vegetative form of B. subtilis RNA polymerase, as would be expected for an early phage gene