Modi Wins The Semi-Finals.

The rest of Monday's News Items.

1. Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling party is expected to retain control of India's most populous and political bellwether state of Uttar Pradesh, exit polls show, in a boost to the party's prospects in the 2024 general election. Apart from Uttar Pradesh, home to over 200 million people, four other Indian states -- Punjab, Uttarakhand, Manipur, and Goa -- completed its staggered voting process that began Feb. 10. Ballots will be counted on Thursday, after which official results will be declared. The stakes in Uttar Pradesh -- which is currently also ruled by Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party -- remain high as the state is seen as a road to power in the national government in New Delhi. The election there is being viewed as a "semifinal" for the 2024 national polls in which the BJP will seek a third straight term in power in the country. (Source: asia.nikkei.com)

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2. The Rainforest:

Viewed from space, the Amazon rainforest doesn’t look like an ecosystem on the brink. Clouds still coalesce from the breath of some 390 billion trees. Rivers snake their way through what appears to be a sea of endless green.

Yet satellite images taken over the past several decades reveal that more than 75 percent of the rainforest is losing resilience, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change. The vegetation is drier and takes longer to regenerate after a disturbance. Even the most densely forested tracts struggle to bounce back.

This widespread weakness offers an early warning sign that the Amazon is nearing its “tipping point,” the study’s authors say. Amid rising temperatures and other human pressures, the ecosystem could suffer sudden and irreversible dieback. More than half of the rainforest could be converted into savanna in a matter of decades — a transition that would imperil biodiversity, shift regional weather patterns and dramatically accelerate climate change. (Source: washingtonpost.com)

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3. Gene editing gets safer.

One of the grand challenges with using CRISPR-based gene editing on humans is that the molecular machinery sometimes makes changes to the wrong section of a host's genome, creating the possibility that an attempt to repair a genetic mutation in one spot in the genome could accidentally create a dangerous new mutation in another.

But now, scientists at The University of Texas at Austin have redesigned a key component of a widely used CRISPR-based gene-editing tool, called Cas9, to be thousands of times less likely to target the wrong stretch of DNA while remaining just as efficient as the original version, making it potentially much safer. The work is described in a paper published today in the journal Nature.

"This really could be a game changer in terms of a wider application of the CRISPR Cas systems in gene editing," said Kenneth Johnson, a professor of molecular biosciences and co-senior author of the study with David Taylor, an assistant professor of molecular biosciences. The paper's co-first authors are postdoctoral fellows Jack Bravo and Mu-Sen Liu. (Source: sciencedaily.com, nature.com)

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4. You say potato:

More than 20 years after the first release of the human genome, scientists at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne, have for the first time decoded the highly complex genome of the potato. This technically demanding study lays the biotechnological foundation to accelerate the breeding of more robust varieties -- a goal in plant breeding for many years and an important step for global food security.

When shopping for potatoes on a market today, buyers may well be going home with a variety that was already available more than 100 years ago. Traditional potato varieties are popular. And yet this example also highlights a lack of diversity among the predominant potato varieties. However, that could soon change: researchers in the group of geneticist Korbinian Schneeberger were able to generate the first full assembly of a potato genome. This paves the way for breeding new, robust varieties:

"The potato is becoming more and more integral to diets worldwide including even Asian countries like China where rice is the traditional staple food. Building on this work, we can now implement genome-assisted breeding of new potato varieties that will be more productive and also resistant to climate change -- this could have a huge impact on delivering food security in the decades to come.” (via sciencedaily.com, nature.com)