Agricultural Biotechnology and Ethics

Study Notes

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.

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.

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.