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Teasel and Fields (Small), oil on aluminum, 2009. This issue brings together several articles on technologies for breeding plants for food, fuel or the production of industrial chemicals and biopharmaceuticals. Artwork by John Knight.
Galvanizing plant science in Europe will depend on an overhaul of the tangle of indefensible regulations themselves, not on the advent of new plant breeding technologies that may escape existing rules.
As parts of the developing world embrace biotech, the focus is shifting from food production to fuels, industrial chemicals and even drugs. Daniel Grushkin investigates.
New techniques for manipulating plant genomes are yielding plants touted as nontransgenic. Will that relieve regulatory burden? Emily Waltz investigates.
The first crops obtained through new plant breeding techniques are close to commercialization. Regulatory issues will determine the adoption of the techniques by breeders.
Sites where RNA editing occurs can be found using RNA-Seq, but false positives confound the data analysis. Peng et al. describe algorithms for accurately calling editing events, and apply them to identify ~22,600 events, mostly A→G changes, in a human transcriptome.
Cultured human pluripotent stem cells can be differentiated to immature pancreatic beta cells, but no one has yet succeeded in maturing these cells in vitro. Blum et al. define markers of beta-cell maturation that can be used to screen conditions for generating fully functional beta cells.
Two groups describe approaches for synthesizing and assaying the function of thousands of variants of mammalian DNA regulatory elements. Melnikov et al. use their results to engineer short optimized regulatory elements in human cells, whereas Patwardhan et al. study enhancers hundreds of bases long in mice.
An improved understanding of enhancers in mammalian genomes could facilitate the design of new regulatory elements. Melnikov et al. synthesize thousands of ~90 nt enhancer variants, assay their activity in human cells and use the data to rationally optimize synthetic enhancers.
The events that lead from plated human blastocysts to embryonic stem cells are poorly understood. Close analysis reveals a transient intermediate state with a distinct molecular profile.
PARP inhibitors have recently entered phase 3 clinical trials as cancer therapeutics, but the specificity of many of these compounds is unknown. Wahlberg et al. used biochemical approaches to show that most PARP inhibitors target multiple PARP family members.
Sixteen years after the commercialization of crops produced by traditional transgenic technology, a raft of new approaches are opening new opportunities in plant biotechnology. This focus issue of Nature Biotechnologyhighlights these technologies and their impact on plant breeding and their impact on regulatory oversight.