Agricultural Biotechnology and Ethics

Agricultural Biotechnology

• Global demands for food, bioenergy, and specialty products, coupled with environmental changes, present substantial challenges to agricultural production.
• Agricultural biotechnology offers a promising solution, but ethical and sociocultural concerns must be addressed for widespread trust and adoption.
• Effective solutions need to be ethical, socially responsive, relevant to diverse backgrounds, and communicated clearly to the public.
• Ethical approaches, principled decision-making, citizen-stakeholder participation, science communication, and bioethics education are important to guide responsible agricultural biotechnology use.

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) and Mass Spectrometry (MS) in Livestock Metabolomics

• Advances in NMR, MS, and omics sciences have improved understanding of molecular mechanisms and pathways related to animal physiology and pathology.
• Metabolomics is a post-genomics tool analyzing small molecular metabolites to provide insight into organism status over time.
• Researchers are focusing on metabolomics studies in livestock due to its value in livestock management and precision dairying.
• The goal of current research is to provide insights into the current research output from various areas of livestock, including nutri-metabolomics, disease diagnosis, reproductive disorders, pharmaco-metabolomics, genomics studies, and dairy production.

Forensic DNA Phenotyping (FDP)

• FDP predicts visible human traits from DNA, aiding in investigations.
• It has become an important advancement because it provides intelligence information from DNA traces helping police investigations.
• Standard DNA profiling often has limited use for identifying unknown perpetrators.
• The IrisPlex DNA test system, in this context, can predict eye color from trace DNA.
• A new system, IrisPlex-S, provides simultaneous prediction of eye, hair, and skin color from trace DNA.
• This system utilizes SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) to perform these predictions.
• A 17-plex assay, developed in accordance with SWGDAM guidelines, achieves the accuracy of 24-plex assay even with very low quantity of sample.
• The IrisPlex-S methodology allows estimating probabilities for individual skin, eye, and hair color categories.
• The IrisPlex-S DNA test represents the first validated tool for simultaneous prediction of eye, hair, and skin color from DNA.