scholarly journals Overcoming barriers to the registration of new varieties

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chin Jian Yang ◽  
Joanne Russell ◽  
Luke Ramsay ◽  
William Thomas ◽  
Wayne Powell ◽  
...  

AbstractDistinctness, Uniformity and Stability (DUS) is an intellectual property system introduced in 1961 by the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) for safeguarding the investment and rewarding innovation in developing new plant varieties. Despite the rapid advancement in our understanding of crop biology over the past 60 years, the DUS system has not changed and is still dependent upon a set of morphological traits for testing candidate varieties. As the demand for more plant varieties increases, the barriers to registration of new varieties become more acute and thus require urgent review to the system. To highlight the challenges and remedies in the current system, we evaluated a comprehensive panel of 805 UK barley varieties that span the entire history of DUS testing. Our findings reveal the system deficiencies and provide evidence for a shift towards a robust genomics enabled registration system for new crop varieties.

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chin Jian Yang ◽  
Joanne Russell ◽  
Luke Ramsay ◽  
William Thomas ◽  
Wayne Powell ◽  
...  

AbstractDistinctness, Uniformity and Stability (DUS) is an intellectual property system introduced in 1961 by the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) for safeguarding the investment and rewarding innovation in developing new plant varieties. Despite the rapid advancement in our understanding of crop biology over the past 60 years, the DUS system has changed little and is still largely dependent upon a set of morphological traits for testing candidate varieties. As the demand for more plant varieties increases, the barriers to registration of new varieties become more acute and thus require urgent review to the system. To highlight the challenges and remedies in the current system, we evaluated a comprehensive panel of 805 UK barley varieties that span the entire history of DUS testing. Our findings reveal the system deficiencies such as inconsistencies in DUS traits across environments, limitations in DUS trait combinatorial space, and inadequacies in currently available DUS markers. We advocate the concept of genomic DUS and provide evidence for a shift towards a robust genomics-enabled registration system for new crop varieties.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Weizhao Yang ◽  
Nathalie Feiner ◽  
Catarina Pinho ◽  
Geoffrey M. While ◽  
Antigoni Kaliontzopoulou ◽  
...  

AbstractThe Mediterranean basin is a hotspot of biodiversity, fuelled by climatic oscillation and geological change over the past 20 million years. Wall lizards of the genus Podarcis are among the most abundant, diverse, and conspicuous Mediterranean fauna. Here, we unravel the remarkably entangled evolutionary history of wall lizards by sequencing genomes of 34 major lineages covering 26 species. We demonstrate an early (>11 MYA) separation into two clades centred on the Iberian and Balkan Peninsulas, and two clades of Mediterranean island endemics. Diversification within these clades was pronounced between 6.5–4.0 MYA, a period spanning the Messinian Salinity Crisis, during which the Mediterranean Sea nearly dried up before rapidly refilling. However, genetic exchange between lineages has been a pervasive feature throughout the entire history of wall lizards. This has resulted in a highly reticulated pattern of evolution across the group, characterised by mosaic genomes with major contributions from two or more parental taxa. These hybrid lineages gave rise to several of the extant species that are endemic to Mediterranean islands. The mosaic genomes of island endemics may have promoted their extraordinary adaptability and striking diversity in body size, shape and colouration, which have puzzled biologists for centuries.


Author(s):  
Mihail Buharin

In 2018–2020, a group of researchers of the project “The Second Russian Turkestan Expedition of Academician Sergei Oldenburg in 1914–1915. Unpublished Materials from RAS Archives” have identified and prepared for publication the entire body of primary scientific documents from RAS archives. The documents fully cover the work of Russian researchers in studying Qianfodong and Turpan Oasis. Through their efforts, the works that undoubtedly represent the greatest achievements of Russian Oriental studies in their entire history are being introduced to academia. The biographies of all the participants of the works have been largely restored, and their previously unknown correspondence has been prepared for publication. The key result of the research was the preparation for publication of Academician Sergei Oldenburg’s “Description of the Qianfodong Caves near Dunhuang”. The importance of Oldenburg’s paper in the site study has only increased over the past century. The most promising areas for further work include the restoration and preparation for printing of the photographic archive of the Second Russian Turkestan Expedition consisting of over 2,000 images stored in the State Hermitage Museum. The publication of this photographic archive will completely fill a major gap in the history of Russian Oriental studies.


2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 181-198
Author(s):  
Marcin Kula

Adam Leszczyński’s book Ludowa historia Polski. Historia wyzysku i oporu. Mitologia panowania (2020) [A People’s History of Poland: A Story of Exploitation and Resistance – the Mythology of Ruling] contains a historiosophical vision and covers the entire history of Poland in a manner that has not been seen in academic Polish historiography for years. Leszczyński focuses on analyzing the history of the popular classes. He describes this peasant nation and its work, status, and living conditions, along with the poor state of the countryside; he writes of the humiliating treatment of the peasants in the interwar period, and about popular behavior and revolts, first, for example, in the form of flight from the manor, then in the development of socialist, national, or peasant movements, and later as revolts in rural areas in the interwar period and opposition to collectivization in the People’s Republic of Poland. Leszczyński shows that in the past the peasants had no interest in working well. He presents the working conditions in factories in the early period of industrialization and the emerging conflicts. The author of the essay considers that the facts and phenomena in the history of the peasants presented by Leszczyński may be a good starting and reference point for analyses of very different matters in historiography and in contemporary research. He appreciates Leszczyński’s wide-ranging, anti-elite, and pro-people synthesis.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 22 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANDREW J. ROSS

A list of all known taxa described or recorded from Burmese amber from the published literature up to the end of 2018 is given, along with a comprehensive bibliography. The history of the study of inclusions is summarised, and demonstrates that the number of species has risen exponentially over the past two decades. The first three species were named in 1916 and by the end of 1920 a total of 42 species had been named by T.D.A. Cockerell. Only three more species were named by 1999 though by the end of 2018 the total had risen to an incredible 1,192 species, of which over half were named in the past three years. Some 320 species were named in 2018, the highest number described from one type of amber in any one year in the entire history of amber studies.


2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (1_suppl) ◽  
pp. 21-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Fenwick

Anaesthetists are acutely aware of the legal constraint of reporting to the coroner deaths in association with anaesthesia. The evolution of the office of the coroner in England is presented and the relationship with the discovery and evolution of anaesthesia is examined. The legal and medical climate in the 19th century is described, with some of the key participants named and their roles explained. The 19th century was an age of questioning and exploration, which led to the elucidation of the problems with chloroform and set the path for progress in monitoring in anaesthesia. Comments are made on the development of anaesthetic mortality reporting into its current system and some of the benefits flowing from it. The collaboration of the various state mortality committees in producing a triennial national report is an important way to ensure that the lessons of the past are kept in mind in the present. The author believes that mortality reporting, the analysis of data and the dissemination of information is a valuable field of research, monitoring and educational tool. Primum non nocere is particularly pertinent in anaesthesia.


1994 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 349-353 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Sperber

Anti-Semitism is the darkest and ugliest side of a modern German history that has had more than its share of dark and ugly sides. There is a strong and intellectually by no means illegitimate temptation to see the entire history of German anti-Semitism as a one-way street leading straight to the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” Yet such a teleological approach to anti-Semistism does not do justice to the complexity of the past, does not highlight what Karl Schleunes has called “the twisted road to Auschwitz.” The excellent thematic articles in this issue all take up this complexity, their authors demonstrating a subtle and sensitive approach toward understanding anti-Semitic attitudes and behavior. One could go further and say that the whole is more than the sum of the parts, that several themes running through all the individual contributions describe and characterize a one hundred year history of Catholic anti-Semitism in Germany. I have identified four such themes and will discuss their changes and variations, both over time and in the different handling of them by the authors.


2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 513-530 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Huber

Over the past forty years, a growing number of television documentaries have attempted to produce a history of Anglo-American popular music for a wide audience. This article represents an attempt to come to terms with the particularity of the popular music documentary form and the different ways in which these documentaries present themselves as authoritative public texts that circulate understandings about popular music’s past. The argument is inspired by the landmark mid-1970s installment in this tradition: Tony Palmer’s epic seventeen-part narrative, All You Need Is Love. While this series makes strong historical claims—in Palmer’s words, it sets out to tell “nothing less than the entire history and development of popular music”—the author argues that the series is, in fact, based on the tropes and discourses of memory. Through an analysis of some of the particular formal and aesthetic characteristics of the series, this article reveals the ways in which talking and thinking about the past of popular music and its culture necessarily call on an experience of the senses that is simultaneously replayed and refracted as memory.


1963 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 3-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chong-Sik Lee

If one were to believe the official histories written in North Korea during the past few years, political developments in North Korea after 1945 and even the entire history of the Korean Communist movement would seem to have been relatively simple. According to North Korean historians, the new proletariat took over the leadership of the struggle for national liberation after the bourgeois-led March First Movement of 1919 had failed. The Korean Communist Party, first organised in 1925, ceased to operate in 1928 because the sectarians in the Party leadership failed to establish a link with the surging movement of the workers and peasants. The national liberation movement recovered its vigour and direction in the 1930s only because Kim D-song, whose strategy and tactics were the most scientific and most in accord with the principles of Marxism-Leninism, provided leadership. Kim Il-song became the “beacon” of the revolutionary movement, and the Korean People's Revolutionary Army under him fought against the Japanese “shoulder to shoulder with the Soviet Army.”


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1961 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 490-498
Author(s):  
Thomas E. Cone

It appears that a biologic measurement so mundane as the birth weight of the newly born infant was of little interest to physicians throughout almost the entire history of western medicine. Roederer, in 1753, slightly more than 200 years ago, published the first accurate value for an infant's weight at birth. In reviewing the course of obtaining so elementary a statistic as a newborn infants birth weight, two findings still remain enigmatic. The first is why so many distinguished physicians of the past lacked the curiosity to weigh a newborn accurately; the second, and perhaps, the more disturbing, is why such celebrated physicians were content to copy servilely the erroneous values of others.


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