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Australasian Biotechnology, Vol. 11 No. 1, 2001, pp. 24 INTERNATIONAL BIOTECHNOLOGY Code Number: au01006
The American Medical Association (AMA) released an executive summary, “Genetically Modified Crops and Foods.” The AMA statements were recommended by the Council of Scientific Affairs and adopted as AMA Policy at the 2000 Interim AMA Meeting this month. The AMA recommendations were based on 11 reports issued over the past two years by various scientific and government bodies, scientific references related to the safety, regulation, and environmental impact of transgenic crops and food, and information obtained from scientific and regulatory web sites. According to the results AMA released, “More than 40 transgenic crop varieties have been cleared through the federal review process with enhanced agronomic and/or nutritional characteristics or one or more features of pest protection (insect and viruses) and tolerance to herbicides. Crops and foods produced using recombinant DNA techniques have been available for fewer than 10 years and no long-term effects have been detected to date. These foods are substantially equivalent to their conventional counterparts.” The executive summary can also be found at: http://www.ama.assn.org/ama/pub/article/2036-3604.html JAPAN BIOLOGICAL INFORMATICS CONSORTIUM CORPORATIZEDCorporations in the biological informatics sector joined forces with the objective of promoting innovative studies on genomics and biological informatics as well as strengthening state-of-the-art information infrastructure under the integrated support of the government and academia. The “Japan Biological Informatics Consortium (JBIC)” was corporatized on July 5, 2000, with the support of five government ministries and agencies related to the sector, as the nation’s only integrated biological informatics entity. JBIC was created by assistance of Japan Bioindustry Association (JBA) on November 20, 1998 as a voluntary association of 12 corporations (9 related to the bioindustry and 3 to the information industry) and 15 cooperating universities and national research institutes. Since then, the consortium has been engaged in research projects to improve bioinformatics infrastructure and to develop cutting-edge technology in biological informatics. The consortium has kept growing in scale with the increasing participation of a wider range of businesses, including pharmaceuticals, chemicals, food and genetic testing, as well as supporting businesses such as data processing, biological reagent development, analytical instrumentation and biotech start-up businesses. Membership has reached 75 and the number of cooperating universities and public institutions increased to 33 by July 2000. The budget has been substantially increased from the initial amount of 450 million yen to a working budget of 9.5 billion yen in fiscal year 2000. NEW UK BIOTECHSRENOVO Renovo’s core business activity is the development of innovative and efficacious approaches to prevent scarring and enhance tissue repair from the discovery phase to clinically proven commercial product. The company has a number of new molecules entering human clinical trial, or in advanced research and development, together with a platform technology in Wound Genomics and Proteomics. Further details can be found on their website BIOTICA Biotica Technology Limited focuses on the discovery of novel biopharmaceuticals through the targeted alteration of biosynthetic pathways producing natural products. Its platform technologies enable both the specific and combinatorial biosynthesis of bioactive polyketides and mixed polyketide-polypeptides. Polyketides are a particularly diverse class of natural products that have proven to be a rich source of commercially significant pharmaceuticals and agricultural chemicals. BIO MAKES LABBOOK GENOMIC VIEWER AVAILABLE As a first-step in creating an open and neutral data exchange network for the biotechnology community, BIO is making available a Genomic XML Viewer™ to its members. The Viewer was designed by LabBook, a life-science software development company located in McLean, Va., and Columbus, Ohio. LabBook, a life-science software development company located in McLean, Va., and Columbus, Ohio. LabBook developed the Viewer with a grant from the National Institutes of Health’s Human Genome Project to create user-friendly tools to better visualise genomic data. Life-science researchers will be able to exchange information through an XML-based email, the Genogram™, which is created and read by the Genomic XML Viewer™. The Genomic Viewer facilitates the use of an open XML data standard that will eventually allow life-sciences researchers, suppliers and content and service providers to interact and exchange information through a universal data language. This open XML standard will enable the creation, delivery, integration and storage of documents containing complex sequence information, features and annotations. It also provides the ability to describe how to visualise these elements. BIO is helping to make this tool available to the biotech community to encourage the release and development of XML-based tools that support underlying standards for the industry. The Genomic XML Viewer™ enhances the utility of genetic sequence data, automatically and securely converting GenBank sequence files into dynamic visual displays. This allows the user to understand annotated sequence features through an intuitive graphic interface. At the same time the Viewer retains all of the essential information links from the original sequence entry so the user can quickly retrieve important supporting documents such as literature references. The graphic display is fully scalable to allow analysis of the data at all possible levels of resolution. APOLOGYThe article entitled Bacteriophages: An Alternative to Antibiotics? published in Australasian Biotechnology Vol 9 No 5, p265 - 269 was originally published in Biotechnology and Development Monitor No 39 (1999). That journal has a policy of not protecting articles by copyright to enable articles to be reproduced by others (just as we have done). We make no claim to copyright of that article, and apologise unreservedly if we have implied in any way that we hold any copyright to that article. Martin Playne, Senior Editor Copyright 2001 - AusBiotech |
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