This document provides an opinion of the Scientific Panel on Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO Panel) of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) on genetically modified maize MON 863 and the maize hybrid MON 863 x MON 810. The opinion is based on two questions raised by the Commission related to applications for the placing of the maize on the market by Monsanto under the Novel Food Regulat...

1.1 Purpose The use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in agriculture is rising, but not without debate. There are many scientists who argue that genetic engineering in agriculture is the best way to solve many issues of poverty, food security, environmental harm, and the need for increasing competitiveness in sales, but others raise ethical issues regarding the health of the people who c...

In most countries, systems are in place to analyse food products for the potential presence of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), to enforce labelling requirements and to screen for the potential presence of unauthorised GMOs. With the growing number of GMOs on the world market, a larger diversity of methods is required for informative analyses. In this paper, the specificity of an extended...

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) can be defined as organisms in which the genetic material (DNA) has been altered in a way that does not occur naturally. The technology is often called “modern biotechnology” or “gene technology”, sometimes also “recombinant DNA technology” or “genetic engineering”. It allows selected individual genes to be transferred from one organism into another, also b...

A 26-year-old man residing in a village of Thai Nguyen Province, North Vietnam, visited the Thai Nguyen Provincial Hospital in July 2008. He felt a bulge-sticking pain in his left eye and extracted 5 small nematode worms by himself half a day before visiting the hospital. Two more worms were extracted from his left eye by a medical doctor, and they were morphologically observed and genetically ...

Is the genetic diversity of parasites infecting male and female hosts equal or different? This is the question we address in this paper by studying the neutral genetic variability of the plathyhelminth trematode Schistosoma mansoni within males and females of its natural murine host Rattus rattus in the marshy forest focus of Guadeloupe (French West Indies). Using seven microsatellite markers, ...

BACKGROUND Anecdotal evidence suggests that male sex hormones are proatherogenic. We hypothesized that the male sex hormone receptor, the androgen receptor (AR), acts as a molecular switch in sex-specific inflammatory signaling in vascular cells. MATERIALS AND METHODS AR expression in human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs), human monocyte-derived macrophages (MDMs) or HeLa cells was ...

The potential for selective harvests to induce rapid evolutionary change is an important question for conservation and evolutionary biology, with numerous biological, social and economic implications. We analyze 39 years of phenotypic data on horn size in bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis) subject to intense trophy hunting for 23 years, after which harvests nearly ceased. Our analyses revealed a s...