RevolutionX
Member
If it is possible to identify specific traits, select them using this biotech kit, and get the desired results then i could see this home kit to have a positive impact on cannabis breeding. Any thoughts?
http://www.scienceinpublic.com/2003/Cambia/background.htm
Coming soon: The DIY plant biotech kit
“CAMBIA’s aim is to deliver ‘open source’ genetic technologies”
Within the next 12 months, Richard Jefferson hopes to extricate plant molecular geneticists the world round from the grip of giants, by providing them with a “complete IP and technical workaround” for key technologies for gene transfer in plants.
Jefferson, CEO of the Centre for the Application of Molecular Biology to International Agriculture (CAMBIA) in Canberra, will be one of the speakers at the forum ‘Public versus private science — who wins?’ at the International Congress of Genetics in Melbourne in July.
He says CAMBIA’s do-it-yourself technology package will include an effective gene-transfer tool as well as selection systems for transgenic cells. It will allow almost any small start-up plant biotech company to experiment with its good ideas without necessarily having to enter early-stage licensing or partnering agreements with multinational life science companies that control the genes and the means to transform plants.
The California-born molecular geneticist, an Australian resident for 11 years, is the inventor of the renowned glucuronidase (GUS) reporter-gene system — when co-expressed with a chosen gene, the blue-staining enzyme highlights the gene’s expression pattern in plant tissues. His technology has been used in thousands of field trials, is licensed by over 50 corporations, and was instrumental in the development of many of the products of agbiotech, including Roundup Ready soybeans.
Broader horizons
Jefferson’s horizons today are now much broader. He wants to radically reform the way gene technology is applied to agriculture. Instead of transplanting whole genes, molecular breeders would use minor HART surgery (HART stands for homologous allelic recombination/replacement technologies).
HART would involve subtle, in situ surgery on the plant’s own genes, yet it could dramatically change the performance and productivity of today’s crops.
Jefferson says it is now clear that the often dramatic phenotypic differences between even distantly related plant and animal species arise in subtle changes in gene regulation, and their rippledown effects through gene networks, rather than from changes in protein sequence.
Rice and maize, for example, diverged some 60 million years ago, but their genes retain a high degree of homology, and are still arrayed in essentially the same order on corresponding chromosomes.
Jefferson believes HART technologies, developed as an international collaboration with an open-source licensing platform, could address the anti-GM movement’s perennial complaint that introducing ‘foreign’ DNA into plants could have unpredictable consequences. More importantly, HART could allow the community to reap the benefits of DNA-sequencing projects much more rapidly and effectively. These technologies are not yet available to plant sciences, and must be developed and shared in new ways.
Jefferson says HART could be described as ‘stealth’ genetics. With in situ modification, there will be no super fluous DNA code to indicate where or what changes were made — just tweaking the odd DNA base will change the protein sequence, or the gene’s expression.
“When HART is achieved, the critics doubtless will bemoan the absence of the very genetic flotsam they currently decry,” he said.
But CAMBIA’s major drive is to deliver a suite of ‘open source’ genetic technologies, and plant transformation tools, to molecular plant breeders around the world, breaking the stranglehold that multinational agbiotech companies exert on the technology and its applications.
Jefferson wants to give plant breeders and scientists technologies in a form inspired by computing’s Linux operating system. But he stresses he is not suggesting that companies make their valuable patents free to all.
“What I want is to democratise innovation — to ensure that the core of innovative capability is distributed and shared in such a way that people are bound legally, in acquiring access, to share improvements they might make themselves.
“But it will only work with intellectual property as a binding mechanism. The licensee would be required to agree that any improvements would either be shared, or if they were maintained as an in-house trade secret, they would not stop others developing the same improvements.
“Keeping in mind Thomas Jefferson’s idea of using a formal grant of intellectual property rights to balance social benefit with private gain, a cogent argument can be made that HARTs for agriculture and medicine would qualify as a unique public good.”
Jefferson says that the agbiotech sector is currently confronting “complete and total constipation” — companies and institutions are fighting over who owns the tools for gene technology, rather than getting on with the far more important business of applying them widely to developing new crops that will be more productive, will improve human health, and benefit the environment, and which will thereby win the support of a sceptical public.
The current wrangle over ownership of the intellectual property for RNA interference is a case in point — Jefferson believes the powerful new tool for modifying plants, and exploring plant gene function, is so fundamental to progress in molecular plant breeding that it should be part of the open source package for plant breeders around the world, a view he shares with Nobel laureate John Sulston, one of his fellow speakers at the delegates forum at ICoG2003.
Gene activity
Jefferson is unimpressed by what he regards as “some overly-reductionist genomics projects” in plants and animals — having a map, a complete catalogue and the full DNA code of a tomato, a cow or a wheat, provides little information about what individual genes do, much less how gene activity is networked to influence desirable traits.
CAMBIA’s Transgenomics Initiative is based on the premise that an orchestrated change in a group of genes will have a more profound and valuable impacts on a selected population than the conventional, single-gene transplant approach.
Rather than slog through billions of DNA bases, CAMBIA has developed an innovative technology that involves inserting a specially constructed reporter gene linked to a transcriptional activator sequence into plant cells; the construct will insert randomly at locations throughout the species’ genome.
Harnessing patterns
By chance, the construct will sometimes insert next to a gene that is active only in a specific tissue — say, in root cells, or pollen, or floral tissues. The activator will ‘capture’ the expression pattern of the adjacent gene, so that any new gene introduced into the plant will be expressed in the same tissue-specific pattern.
Jefferson says CAMBIA researchers have generated thousands of plants in which the expression patterns of anonymous genes have been harnessed in this manner. It then becomes a matter of selecting the appropriate plant, introgressing a candidate gene and, it will ‘play’ in the target tissue.
CAMBIA’s technology has been used by China’s leading plant biotechnologist, Prof Zhang Qifa at Huazhong University, to create more than 20,000 unique lines for field- testing.
http://www.scienceinpublic.com/2003/Cambia/background.htm
Coming soon: The DIY plant biotech kit
“CAMBIA’s aim is to deliver ‘open source’ genetic technologies”
Within the next 12 months, Richard Jefferson hopes to extricate plant molecular geneticists the world round from the grip of giants, by providing them with a “complete IP and technical workaround” for key technologies for gene transfer in plants.
Jefferson, CEO of the Centre for the Application of Molecular Biology to International Agriculture (CAMBIA) in Canberra, will be one of the speakers at the forum ‘Public versus private science — who wins?’ at the International Congress of Genetics in Melbourne in July.
He says CAMBIA’s do-it-yourself technology package will include an effective gene-transfer tool as well as selection systems for transgenic cells. It will allow almost any small start-up plant biotech company to experiment with its good ideas without necessarily having to enter early-stage licensing or partnering agreements with multinational life science companies that control the genes and the means to transform plants.
The California-born molecular geneticist, an Australian resident for 11 years, is the inventor of the renowned glucuronidase (GUS) reporter-gene system — when co-expressed with a chosen gene, the blue-staining enzyme highlights the gene’s expression pattern in plant tissues. His technology has been used in thousands of field trials, is licensed by over 50 corporations, and was instrumental in the development of many of the products of agbiotech, including Roundup Ready soybeans.
Broader horizons
Jefferson’s horizons today are now much broader. He wants to radically reform the way gene technology is applied to agriculture. Instead of transplanting whole genes, molecular breeders would use minor HART surgery (HART stands for homologous allelic recombination/replacement technologies).
HART would involve subtle, in situ surgery on the plant’s own genes, yet it could dramatically change the performance and productivity of today’s crops.
Jefferson says it is now clear that the often dramatic phenotypic differences between even distantly related plant and animal species arise in subtle changes in gene regulation, and their rippledown effects through gene networks, rather than from changes in protein sequence.
Rice and maize, for example, diverged some 60 million years ago, but their genes retain a high degree of homology, and are still arrayed in essentially the same order on corresponding chromosomes.
Jefferson believes HART technologies, developed as an international collaboration with an open-source licensing platform, could address the anti-GM movement’s perennial complaint that introducing ‘foreign’ DNA into plants could have unpredictable consequences. More importantly, HART could allow the community to reap the benefits of DNA-sequencing projects much more rapidly and effectively. These technologies are not yet available to plant sciences, and must be developed and shared in new ways.
Jefferson says HART could be described as ‘stealth’ genetics. With in situ modification, there will be no super fluous DNA code to indicate where or what changes were made — just tweaking the odd DNA base will change the protein sequence, or the gene’s expression.
“When HART is achieved, the critics doubtless will bemoan the absence of the very genetic flotsam they currently decry,” he said.
But CAMBIA’s major drive is to deliver a suite of ‘open source’ genetic technologies, and plant transformation tools, to molecular plant breeders around the world, breaking the stranglehold that multinational agbiotech companies exert on the technology and its applications.
Jefferson wants to give plant breeders and scientists technologies in a form inspired by computing’s Linux operating system. But he stresses he is not suggesting that companies make their valuable patents free to all.
“What I want is to democratise innovation — to ensure that the core of innovative capability is distributed and shared in such a way that people are bound legally, in acquiring access, to share improvements they might make themselves.
“But it will only work with intellectual property as a binding mechanism. The licensee would be required to agree that any improvements would either be shared, or if they were maintained as an in-house trade secret, they would not stop others developing the same improvements.
“Keeping in mind Thomas Jefferson’s idea of using a formal grant of intellectual property rights to balance social benefit with private gain, a cogent argument can be made that HARTs for agriculture and medicine would qualify as a unique public good.”
Jefferson says that the agbiotech sector is currently confronting “complete and total constipation” — companies and institutions are fighting over who owns the tools for gene technology, rather than getting on with the far more important business of applying them widely to developing new crops that will be more productive, will improve human health, and benefit the environment, and which will thereby win the support of a sceptical public.
The current wrangle over ownership of the intellectual property for RNA interference is a case in point — Jefferson believes the powerful new tool for modifying plants, and exploring plant gene function, is so fundamental to progress in molecular plant breeding that it should be part of the open source package for plant breeders around the world, a view he shares with Nobel laureate John Sulston, one of his fellow speakers at the delegates forum at ICoG2003.
Gene activity
Jefferson is unimpressed by what he regards as “some overly-reductionist genomics projects” in plants and animals — having a map, a complete catalogue and the full DNA code of a tomato, a cow or a wheat, provides little information about what individual genes do, much less how gene activity is networked to influence desirable traits.
CAMBIA’s Transgenomics Initiative is based on the premise that an orchestrated change in a group of genes will have a more profound and valuable impacts on a selected population than the conventional, single-gene transplant approach.
Rather than slog through billions of DNA bases, CAMBIA has developed an innovative technology that involves inserting a specially constructed reporter gene linked to a transcriptional activator sequence into plant cells; the construct will insert randomly at locations throughout the species’ genome.
Harnessing patterns
By chance, the construct will sometimes insert next to a gene that is active only in a specific tissue — say, in root cells, or pollen, or floral tissues. The activator will ‘capture’ the expression pattern of the adjacent gene, so that any new gene introduced into the plant will be expressed in the same tissue-specific pattern.
Jefferson says CAMBIA researchers have generated thousands of plants in which the expression patterns of anonymous genes have been harnessed in this manner. It then becomes a matter of selecting the appropriate plant, introgressing a candidate gene and, it will ‘play’ in the target tissue.
CAMBIA’s technology has been used by China’s leading plant biotechnologist, Prof Zhang Qifa at Huazhong University, to create more than 20,000 unique lines for field- testing.
the future!!
