Allison K Wilson

The Bioscience Resource Project · www.bioscienceresource.org

- English and Chinese (simplified) versions available - The Olympic Charter states that “The goal of Olympism is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.” As athletes from across the globe gather together today for the st...

The direct bat progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 can be traced to South-Central Yunnan. This is a major step forward in the search for the origin of COVID-19.

Abstract: The role of GM crops in supporting sustainable food systems is an ongoing controversy. Underlying this controversy, I will argue, are radically different definitions of agricultural sustainability. One is a narrow definition, based on amelioration of current unsustainable practices, such as the use of synthetic pesticides in agriculture....

SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the current pandemic, is in many ways an enigma to virologists. First, the virus enters human cells using a viral spike protein that is a tremendous fit for its human receptor (a protein called ACE2). This close fit allows the virus to spread very efficiently between people but such precision cannot plausibly h...

The view that COVID-19 (Sars-CoV-2) has a potential laboratory origin is being attributed to President Trump. But plenty of scientists are raising this issue too. What are the chances, after all, that the epicentre of the COVID-19 outbreak should occur within literal walking distance of the leading research and collection centre in the world for SA...

New research published by officials of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has discovered that foreign DNA can become inadvertently introduced into the genomes of gene-edited animals. Gene-editing techniques are widely considered to offer substantial improvements, in terms of precision, over older genetic engineering techniques. But the new FDA...

The article “GMO Golden Rice Offers No Nutritional Benefits Says FDA” was published today (Mon 4th June 2018) on Independent Science News. It was written by Allison Wilson, PhD and Jonathan Latham, PhD. Synopsis: We have previously reported on the difficulties experienced by the Gates-funded Golden Rice project in producing a GMO Golden Rice with a...

On 28 April 2018 the European Parliament voted for a complete and permanent ban on all outdoor uses of the three most commonly used neonicotinoid pesticides. With the partial exception of the state of Ontario, Canada, governments elsewhere have failed to take action. Below is a letter, signed by 232 scientists from around the world, urgently callin...

Synopsis: The Tyrolean commercial apple industry had begun to expand into the mountain community of Mals, Italy. Two experimental orchards had already been planted to test which varieties best suited the area. More ominously, pesticide drift from its industrial apple farms had been detected at high levels in the area’s schoolyards and on the produc...

https://www.independentsciencenews.org/health/goodbye-golden-rice-gm-trait-leads-to-drastic-yield-loss/ Synopsis: For nearly 20 years, GMO Golden Rice has been promoted as a potent tool to alleviate vitamin A deficiency. Golden Rice has never been commercialised, however, and its failure to reach the market has been blamed on “over-regulation” and...

To view the database: https://www.poisonpapers.org/the-poison-papers/ The Bioscience Resource Project and the Center for Media and Democracy today are releasing a trove of rediscovered and newly digitized chemical industry and regulatory agency documents stretching back to the 1920s. The documents are available at PoisonPapers.org. Together, the pa...

A talk on my unpublished and ongoing work on the unintended consequences (also know as unintended effects) of genetic engineering. Unintended consequences (UCs) have important implications for farmers, scientists and regulators. Documented consequences range from loss of pathogen resistance to yield losses to increases in out-crossing. UCs are ofte...

The first researchers to systematically document ill health in livestock, pets, and people living near fracking drill sites were Michelle Bamberger and Robert Oswald. Bamberger, a veterinarian, and Oswald, a professor of molecular medicine at Cornell University, used a case study approach–looking at individual households–to search for possible effe...

Article found at: https://www.independentsciencenews.org/health/gmo-regulators-hidden-viral-gene-vi-regulators-fail/ It is a followup article to: Regulators Discover a Hidden Viral Gene in Commercial GMO Crops (2013) which described how a scientific paper published in late 2012 shows that US and EU GMO regulators have for many years been inadverten...

A scientific paper published in late 2012 shows that US and EU GMO regulators have for many years been inadvertently approving transgenic events containing a fragment of an unsuspected viral gene. As a result, 54 different transgenic events commercialized internationally contain a substantial segment of the multifunctional Gene VI from Cauliflower...

Recent developments in the application of RNA interference (RNAi) to plants mean that the introduction of transgenes with defined sequences can now routinely result in the inhibition of target RNAs and therefore gene activity. Consequently, there are now greatly enhanced opportunities for the use of this technology in agriculture and speciality cro...

In plants, viral synergisms occur when one virus enhances infection by a distinct or unrelated virus. Such synergisms may be unidirectional or mutualistic but, in either case, synergism implies that protein(s) from one virus can enhance infection by another. A mechanistically related phenomenon is transcomplementation, in which a viral protein, usu...

Many genetic engineers have long resented the regulatory procedures imposed on transgenic crop plants, often arguing that there is no difference between the risks arising from transgenic plants and plants bred using ‘conventional’ methods. A recent proposal calls for complete deregulation of transgenic plants that have only plant DNA inserted into...

Plant transformation has become an essential tool for plant molecular biologists and, almost simultaneously, transgenic plants have become a major focus of many plant breeding programs. The first transgenic cultivar arrived on the market approximately 15 years ago, and some countries have since commercially approved or deregulated (e.g. the United...

Plant transformation is a genetic engineering tool for introducing transgenes into plant genomes. It is now being used for the breeding of commercial crops. A central feature of transformation is insertion of the transgene into plant chromosomal DNA. Transgene insertion is infrequently, if ever, a precise event. Mutations found at transgene inserti...

Nature Biotechnology journal featuring biotechnology articles and science research papers of commercial interest in pharmaceutical, medical, and environmental sciences.

This article has no abstract.

The acceleration of flowering by a long period of low temperature, vernalization, is an adaptation that ensures plants overwinter before flowering. Vernalization induces a developmental state that is mitotically stable, suggesting that it may have an epigenetic basis. The VERNALIZATION2 (VRN2) gene mediates vernalization and encodes a nuclear-local...

In the ciliate Tetrahymena thermophila , thousands of DNA segments of variable size are eliminated from the developing somatic macronucleus by specific DNA rearrangements. It is unclear whether rearrangement of the many different DNA elements occurs via a single mechanism or via multiple rearrangement systems. In this study, we characterized in viv...

Flowering in many plant species is accelerated by a long period of cold temperature, known as a vernalization period. This research investigates how this cold temperature signal is perceived by plant cells and the mechanism by which it influences the transition to flowering. Mutagenesis of the late-flowering, vernalization-responsive, Arabidopsis m...

The Arabidopsis genesFCAandFRIare being studied to dissect the molecular basis of the vernalization requirement in plants. Recessive mutations inFCAand dominant alleles ofFRIcause late flowering. The late flowering phenotype can be converted to early flowering by vernalization in both cases. TheFCAgene encodes a protein containing RNA-binding domai...

The dominant axr2-1 mutation of Arabidopsis thaliana confers resistance to the plant hormones auxin, ethylene, and abscisic acid. In addition, axr2-1 has pleiotropic effects on plant morphology which include gravitropic defects in roots, hypocotyls and inflorescences of axr2-1 plants. Two genetic screens were conducted to isolate new mutations at t...

The axr2 mutation of Arabidopsis thaliana (L.) Heynh. confers resistance to the plant growth hormones auxin, ethylene and abscisic acid. In addition, mutant plants have a pronounced dwarf phenotype and display defects in both shoot and root gravitopism. To further characterize this mutant we have determined the phenotype of both dark- and light-gro...

Mutagenized populations of Arabidopsis thaliana seedlings were screened for plants capable of root growth on inhibitory concentrations of the ethylene precursor 1-aminocyclopropane-1-carboxylic acid. Four of the mutant lines recovered from this screen display a defect in root gravitropism as well as hormone resistance. The aerial portions of these...

We have screened a large population of M2 seeds of Arabidopsis thaliana for plants which are resistant to exogenously applied indole-acetic acid (IAA). One of the resistant lines identified in this screen carries a dominant mutation which we have named axr2. Linkage analysis indicates that the axr2 gene lies on chromosome 3. Plants carrying the axr...

Transgene insertion is infrequently, if ever, a precise event and it therefore causes various alterations to the plant genome. Mutations present at transgene insertion sites include insertion of superfluous DNA and deletion and rearrangement of host chromosomal DNA. These mutations vary in frequency depending in particular on the method of delivery...