Michael Smanski News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

New partnership could put University of Minnesota at center of biomanufacturing industry The BioMADE institute will be in a new building on the St. Paul campus.  January 13, 2021 — 10:09pm Text size Copy shortlink: The University of Minnesota aims to become a hub of bioindustrial manufacturing through a new multimillion-dollar partnership partly funded by the U.S. Department of Defense. The U's Board of Regents last week approved an agreement to host the Bioindustrial Manufacturing and Design Ecosystem (BioMADE), an effort affili...

mosquito in Tanzania, 2009. Credit: Muhammad Mahdi Karim/Wikimedia Commons, GNU 1.2. A new year means new beginnings. But for the residents of Florida Keys, a small archipelago off Florida’s coast, the dawn of 2021 seems to portend ill winds. In August 2020, the local government approved a plan to release 750 million genetically modified (GM) mosquitoes. A British biotech company named Oxitec has planned to execute this release over two years. However, over 236,000 people have signed a petition against this decision because they fear the unknown long-term effects of releasing GM mosquitoes...

A biotech fast-forward button for evolution is on the horizon. Researchers say they have used a novel genetic engineering method to create several new species of fruit fly in the lab for the first time — an achievement which might help put a future without malaria and other insect-borne diseases within reach. The approach, called synthetic speciation, could prove useful in creating safer pest-control technologies, says Maciej Maselko, a postdoctoral fellow studying synthetic biology at Macquarie University. In one far-off scenario, according to Maselko, synthetic speciation might even be ap...