The National Biosafety Authority of Kenya approved the applications for National Performance Trials (NPTs) of biotech corn and cotton, which will commence in October 2017. This was announced by NBA managing director, Willy Tonui, after a meeting with stakeholders, including Kenya Agricultural Livestock and Research Organisation (KALRO) and African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF) who previously received permits for field trials but were stopped by Health Secretary Dr. Cleopa Mailu.

July 2017 saw the release of four new sorghum varieties in Uganda by the National Semi-Arid Resources Research Institute (NaSARRI), one of the implementing partners of the Harnessing Opportunities for Productivity Enhancement of Sorghum and Millets (HOPE) project. The varieties IESV 92043 DL, IS 8193, ICSR 160 and GE 17/1/2013A, (of which the first three were developed at ICRISAT Nairobi, while the last was acquired from Purdue University, USA) possess critical traits such as resistance to drought, diseases and pests.

Several papers have described the use of hydrophobic unnatural base pairs (UBPs) to study mechanisms of DNA replication and transcription (1⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓–7). In PNAS, the study by Zhang et al. (8) claims that UBPs can form stable complementary structures in the absence of hydrogen bonds between base pairs, and that UBPs can be replicated in a bacterial plasmid in virtually any sequence context without loss of the UBPs over many DNA doublings.

ANKARA, Turkey (CIMMYT) – Farmers across Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey are benefiting from a recently launched project that aims to diversify wheat production and strengthen the crop’s resilience to climate change across the three countries.

Socio-economic considerations, multiple agency review, labeling, and legal court challenges are the major obstacles in getting biotech crops to farmers, according to Senior Legal Consultant of the Program for Biosafety Systems (PBS) Atty. Gregory Jaffe, who presented in the Agriculture and Development Seminar Series (ADSS) of the Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture (SEARCA) on July 24, 2017

The 6^th  Meeting of IPC Committee on R&D takes place at the IAS from AUGUST 7 to 9, 2017.

Agenda and the available background papers (received by IPC as of 2^nd August 2017) of the 6^th Meeting of IPC Committee on R&D, 7^th – 9^th August 2017, HCM City for your ready reference. Documents by the IPC could be downloaded as followed:

The ISAAA report, (Brief 52) Global Status of Commercialized Biotech/GM Crops: 2016, was launched in Pakistan in an event organized by the Pakistan Biotechnology Information Center (PABIC) in collaboration with International Center for Chemical and Biological Sciences (ICCBS), University of Karachi (ICCBS). The report launch was conducted during the inaugural ceremony of SINO-Pak Hybrid Rice Research Center at ICCBS, University of Karachi on July 26, 2017.

In a major step towards accuracy and completeness for the wheat genome, a team of scientists from Johns Hopkins present a new assembly that demonstrates the importance of using long, highly-accurate reads for resolving extremely complex, repetitive genomes. The project aimed to overcome a longstanding challenge for wheat research as common bread wheat has one of the most complex genomes, with 6 copies of each chromosome, enormous numbers of near-identical sequences scattered throughout, and an overall size of more than 15 billion bases.

During the Open Day event of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Sector Minister, Prof. Kwabena Frimpong Boateng said, "The Crop Research Institute (CRI) has medium and long term plans using science and genetic engineering to produce something that could fight the fall armyworm in the years to come…

FAO together with the European Union (EU) is stepping up support for the legal timber trade in the Lao People's Democratic Republic through  two new projects that will strengthen the roles of civil society and the private sector in improving forest law enforcement, governance and trade in the country