The Center for Food Safety (CFS) is a non-profit public interest group in the USA with a mandate to protect consumers and other interest groups from harmful food technologies, using legal actions, submission of policy comments, public education and by providing technical assistance to other organizations. CFS is a strong opponent of GM foods, and is currently in a battle against the USDA and Monsanto Corporation, to prevent Roundup Ready alfalfa from becoming approved for nationwide commercial planting.

This battle began in 2005 when APHIS (USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service) announced it would deregulate the GM alfalfa products. In 2007, CFS brought a lawsuit against Monsanto demanding the USDA do a more thorough study of the environmental and economic impacts of Roundup Ready alfalfa. In a press release on the topic, several concerns are cited, including speculation that the spread of pollen from GMOs will eventually eliminate organic and conventional alfalfa, requiring all farmers to eventually have no choice but to buy the Roundup Ready product, and that "superweeds" resistant to the herbicide will evolve. The court upheld the CFS request and prohibited deregulation of the GM alfalfa until further studies were done. On December 14, 2009, APHIS released the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) to the public, and CFS announced they would continue to fight.

While it appears to me that CFS is just generally opposed to agricultural biotechnology and anything GM, the potential risks to using GM foods certainly do warrant thorough investigation and consideration. Anyone wishing to comment on this issue should be able to do so, on the APHIS website, starting today for the next 60 days (no direct link to comment seems to be posted yet), but I strongly urge you to read the EIS first (and it is NOT a short document!) with a rational and analytical, but unbiased mind.

Companies sometimes look to thermophilic organisms to serve as catalysts for industrial processes. The benefits to this are that environmentally hazardous chemicals, that also pose a threat to human health and safety in the workplace, can sometimes be replaced. Thermophiles are especially useful because they are adapted to higher temperatures, and industrial processes often generate enough heat to destroy normal proteins in mesophilic organisms. How do thermophiles maintain their advantageous qualities? John Drake, at Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, USA, has reported that the rate of spontaneous mutation in thermophiles may be significantly lower than in mesophiles. In his paper, he compares the mutation rates of average organisms (0.003 to 0.004) to those of two thermophiles. Previous tests had shown that, not only do mutation rates reflect a balance between advantageous changes and deleterious ones, but many mutations are more deleterious at higher temperatures. Mutation rates in the thermophiles were measured in reporter genes. The thermophiles displayed basepair mutation rates about 5 times lower than the average mesophile, and insert/delete missense mutation rates about 10-fold lower. The thermophiles also appeared to be missing the mismatch repair system commonly found in bacteria such as E. coli, but had a more efficient DNA replication system, using the same thermostable polymerases that we use for PCR and other gene cloning methods, that created less mutations.

_Source:

Drake, J. 2009. Avoiding dangerous missense: Thermophiles display especially low mutation rates. PLoS Genetics 5(6): e1000520. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1000520

Vaccines aren't just for prophylactic elicitation of immunity in healthy people anymore. While you may be familiar with the use of vaccines for prevention of disease, and their administration to uninfected people, a growing trend in the biomedical industry is development of ACI technologies, i.e. vaccines for the treatment of people already affected by viruses, bacteria, prions or autoimmune diseases not related to an infectious agent.

While it's true that, by definition, "adding antigen to an already infected person may be tantamount to 'carrying coal to Newcastle'." (Sela and Hilleman, 2004), there is potential for treatments that can turn a biological system "on" or "off" even after infection, thus sabotaging already diseased cells. Cancer cells are often very good at evading the body's immune system. The goal of a therapeutic vaccine for cancer is to jump-start or amplify the natural immune response. While the FDA has yet not approved any cancer vaccines for use in the USA, the NCI Factsheet on Cancer Vaccines provides a list of 12 types of cancer for which vaccines are currently in clinical trial.

Cancer treatment vaccines can consist of any number of different antigenic materials, but common choices are proteins or carbohydrates found on the cancer cell surface, or a protein-carbohydrate or -lipid combination. An alternative treatment is to inject a piece of DNA or RNA encoding an antigen, either as "naked" nucleic acid, or encapsulated in a vector such as a "safe" virus, for delivery. Once taken up by healthy cells, it is hoped enough anti-cancer antigen will be produced, through transcription/translation of the genetic material, to trigger a strong immune response.

_Sources;

Sela, M. and Hilleman, M. 2004. Therapeutic vaccines: Realities of today and hopes for tomorrow. PNAS 101:14559. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0405924101

A new knockout human cell line has helped researchers make huge leaps in the discovery of causative factors of some infectious diseases. The human cell line has been developed with only one copy of thousands of genes (chromosome 8 remained diploid), allowing for knockouts to be generated in which there isn't a second copy of the gene to compensate for the loss, through transcription of the encoded protein. The cell line, generated by a group from the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, was used to study which genes are used by both viral and bacterial pathogens, one of which was the influenza virus. In a November 27 article in Science, the team describes which host factors (genes and gene products) are required for influenza infection and cytotoxic effects of several bacterial toxins.