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Genetic diversity in the field is the key to long-term sustainable food production. In agriculture and forestry, genetic diversity can enhance production in all agricultural and ecosystem zones. Genetic erosion is the loss of genetic diversity, which is being caused not just at the level of individual genes but at the level of gene combination, which is even more dangerous. The main cause of genetic erosion is varietal replacement. However, there are many traditional varieties that are extremely high yielding and that can, in fact, form a much bigger mix of varieties available in the field than this very narrow approach to increasing productivity would suggest. Genetic erosion is happening at a more rapid pace in developing countries because of the somewhat faulty planning to bring about change and increase productivity. Above all, agrobiodiversity, which is genetic diversity related to agriculture, is threatened not because of overuse but because it is not used

Gene Campaign is a movement involving organisations across Asia, working towards food and livelihood security for rural and tribal communities. It is deeply concerned about the negative impacts of privatisation on genetic resources through patenting and intellectual property rights. Biological resources are the mainstay of the livelihoods and local economies of communities in developing countries. Ensuring access to these resources is essential to their being able to engage in self-reliant growth. Women who are closely involved with the maintenance of biological resources are also its most sophisticated users, in feeding and looking after their families. The privatisation of these resources would undermine the ability of women to care for their families and seriously jeopardise the health and security of rural and tribal populations.

The paper argues that the Uruguay Round has been impervious to the needs of the developing countries while securing the interests of the industrialised nations. This is particularly evident in the provisions of the TRIPS Agreement, which have negative consequences for the South Asian countries. There are also potential conflicts between the TRIPS patenting regime and agreements such as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the International Understanding being negotiated at the FAO. The paper maintains that the only way to fully ensure a fair deal for South Asian and other developing countries is to remove biodiversity from TRIPS altogether. Meanwhile as a way out it recommends keeping TRIPs as flexible as possible for the time being and working for its ultimate rejection.

To have any relevance to development of a country’s agriculture and to the needs of small farmers, it is necessary for managers of Genetically Engineered (GE) crops to provide real life solutions to the problems inherent in these methods of producing food and fodder. Currently available GM crops are those that were developed for industrialized agriculture in developed countries, complete with their positive and negative traits. At least one of them, the Herbicide Tolerance (HT) trait, is not just irrelevant to our country’s needs, it is downright harmful to the agricultural and food systems that strengthen local food security. Using HT crops will reduce the demand for labor in a labor surplus country where agricultural operations such as weeding provide wages, especially for women; it will reduce food and nutrition availability for the poor by eliminating natural leafy greens, it will strike at human and veterinary health by destroying locally available medicinal plants, and it will increase risks of crop failure by making it impossible to engage in mixed cropping, which distributes risk and provides more food and nutrition.

The excitatory amino acid glutamate plays an important role in the mammalian CNS. Studies conducted from 1940 to 1950 suggested that oral administration of glutamate could have a beneficial effect on normal and retardate intelligence. The neurotoxic nature of glutamate resulting in excitotoxic lesions (neuronal death) is thought possibly to underlie several neurological diseases including Huntington's disease, status epilepticus. Alzheimer's dementia and olivopontocerebellar atrophy. This neurodegenerative effect of glutamate also appears to regulate the formation, modulation and degeneration of brain cytoarchitecture during normal development and adult plasticity, by altering neuronal outgrowth and synaptogenesis. In addition to its function as a neurotransmitter in several regions of the CNS, glutamate seems to be specifically implicated in the memory process. Long-term potentiation (LTP) and long-term depression (LTD), two forms of synaptic plasticity associated with learning and memory, both involve glutamate receptors. Studies with antagonists of glutamate receptors reveal a highly selective dependency of LTP and LTD on the N-methyl-D-aspartate and quisqualate receptors respectively. The therapeutic value of glutamate receptor antagonists is being actively investigated. The most promising results have been obtained in epilepsy and to some extent in ischaemia and stroke. The major drawback remains the inability of antagonists to permeate the blood-brain barrier when administered systemically. Efforts should be directed towards finding antagonists that are lipid soluble and able to cross the blood-brain barrier and to find precursors that would yield the antagonist intracerebrally.

The Indian Parliament has finally passed the Plant Variety Protection and Farmers’ Rights Act (2001). Its passage has ended a long and arduous struggle waged for the recognition of the rights of farmers in India’s sui generis legislation. India has now put in place a law to grant plant breeders’ rights on new varieties of seeds, for the very first time. It has simultaneously provided for farmers’ rights.

SUMMARY Electrophoresis of seed proteins from Phaseolus and Vigna species was carried out on poly-acrylamide gels with cationic and anionic systems. The species were grouped into seven clusters. On the basis of matrices of similarity index, keeping sixty as the minimum intra-cluster similarity coefficient, a three-dimensional model was constructed to represent the relationships amongst the clusters. Five Asiatic species including Phaseolus aureus, P. mungo, P. sublobatus, P. angularis and P. calcaratus formed a cluster which was separate from a cluster of American species. The Vigna species forming a third cluster showed greater affinity with the Asiatic Phaseolus species than with the American ones. P. aconitifolius, a form cultivated in India, and two American species, P. lunatus and P. lathyroides, were distinct between themselves and also from other species.

Monoamine oxidase (MAO) activity in human blood platelets isolated by a single centrifugation at 600g for 2 1/2 minutes, which isolates only 45-65% of total platelets, was highly correlated with the MAO activity in platelets isolated by a method which isolates essentially 100% of platelets (r = 0.95, p less than 0.01). These results indicate that the single centrifugation method, which isolates only a portion of platelets, gives a reliable estimate of MAO activity in the entire platelet population.

Summary The activity of phosphate activated glutaminase, which is the major enzyme yielding glutamate from glutamine has been measured in human blood platelets. The enzyme shows good reproducibility in split duplicate assays and is stable over time. Platelets retain more enzyme activity when stored at 4°C in a buffered medium than when stored frozen. Implications of factors such as age and drug effects are discussed.

The commonly occurring phenotypes and some rare variants of C3 were studied in a North Indian population. Based on known gene frequencies, the Indian population seemed more akin to Mongol, African, and Afghan populations than to Caucasians.

Two groups, with ten and twelve healthy volunteers each were studied. Ten milliliters of blood was drawn by venepuncture, using heparin as anticoagulant, from each proband after overnight fasting and processed according to the following protocol. Group I The blood was divided into three equal parts and treated by different methods. 1. Method 1, plasma recovered immediately and deproteinized. 2. Method 2, plasma recovered immediately, held in ice bath for 1 h, then deproteinized. 3. Method 3, full blood held in ice bath for 1 h, then centrifuged and plasma deproteinized. Group II The same protocol was followed with the difference that in methods 2 and 3, plasma and full blood were allowed to stand for 2 h instead of 1 h.

On account of genetic homologies, trisomy 16 in the mouse is generally regarded as a direct animal model of Down's syndrome. Mouse trisomy 19, on the other hand, can be seen as a general model of human trisomies. A detailed evaluation of the cardiovascular system and skeleton in 109 fetuses with trisomy 16 and 422 balanced siblings was carried out in order to systematize the cardiovascular anomalies and the pathogenetic mechanisms responsible for their formation according to (1) general retardation, (2) genetically determined impairment of neural-crest cell migration, and (3) direct gene action on organogenesis. Skeletal malformations in the form of a rib-vertebra syndrome encountered in Ts 16 are described here for the first time. In 108 fetuses and 219 neonates resulting from cross-breeding to induce trisomy 19, we found no significant increase in the frequency of the foregoing anomalies. These results are discussed with regard to a chromosome-specific genetic influence as opposed to a general effect of chromosome imbalance. The specificity of the Ts16 syndrome is compared with that of individual organ anomalies as can be induced by teratogenic agents. Our investigation shows that specific malformation patterns of a particular type can be produced by a variety of methods. However, the overall patterns of the two syndromes are highly chromosome-specific. On detailed examination, the malformation pattern of mouse trisomy 16 shows significant similarities with that of human trisomy 21.

The extent of genetic determination of platelet glutaminase was evaluated by sampling 13 monozygotic and 11 dizygotic adult male twin pairs. Intraclass correlation coefficients of 0.96 for monozygotic and 0.53 for dizygotic twins together with high heritability estimates indicate a strong genetic component.

There seems to be ample evidence supporting the view that glutamate plays a significant role in the mammalian brain as a neurotransmitter. It is considered to be a likely transmitter candidate in one or more hippocampal pathways [25]. Recently it has been visualized in excitatory, possibly glutamatergic, neurons in the hippocampus [26]. Glutamate has been proposed to mediate memory formation [2, 15, 27]. We wanted to see if blocking glutamate action by a specific glutamate antagonist could result in reduction of learning ability. 2-Amino-4-phosphonobutyric acid (APB) is an analogue of glutamic acid and has been used as a glutamate antagonist in electrophysiological studies on invertebrate neuromuscular junction [7], retina [16, 23, 24] and hippocampus [10, 30]. We tested the influence of APB on the acquisition of two way avoidance learning in the shuttle box and on learning in the water maze. Our results show that intraperitoneal injection of APB led to a reduction in avoidance learning, whereas learning in the water maze was unaffected.