Regulatory Oversight and Safety Assessment of Plants with Novel Traits
Further progress in plant breeding will be achieved by the combination of plant breeding based on experimental field work and novel techniques based on biotechnology. Because both approaches complement one another, their association might offer promising
- PDF / 281,160 Bytes
- 22 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 8 Downloads / 211 Views
Regulatory Oversight and Safety Assessment of Plants with Novel Traits Yann Devos, Karine Lheureux, and Joachim Schiemann
26.1
Introduction – From Foragers to Genetic Modification in a Genomic Era
Because plants are a fundamental constituent of the human diet, either as a direct source of nutrients, or indirectly as feed for animals, scientific and technical advances in agriculture have played a crucial role in ensuring food security, in meeting feedstock demands, and in providing various benefits to society at large. Over the past few centuries, techno-scientific progress in agriculture has improved the reliability and quality of the world food and feed supply, allowing fewer farmers to feed more and more people, with less labour. The whole package of genetically improved plants, irrigation, fertilisers, pesticides and tillage operations has revolutionised agriculture. Throughout the history of plant breeding, various plant breeding techniques have been used to develop and select new gene combinations for improving the performance of plants (Moose and Mumm 2008). Initially, wild plants with useful characteristics were gathered and cultivated. In this domestication process, preferential characteristics observed in phenotypes of wild plant individuals or spontaneous variants were selected and reproduced. This gradual evolution allowed former foragers to increasingly control when, where, and in what quantities food plants were grown, rather than to depend upon vagaries of nature. This evolution went together with the adoption of more sedentary lifestyles. Through the selection of observable phenotypes, farmers and plant breeders have been modifying the underlying genotype of plants to adapt them to human needs (e.g., more favourable characteristics in terms of yield and agronomic,
J. Schiemann Julius Ku¨hn Institute (JKI), Federal Research Centre for Cultivated Plants, Erwin-Baur-Strasse 27, 06484 Quedlinburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] Y. Devos and K. Lheureux European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), GMO Unit, Parma, Italy
F. Kempken and C. Jung (eds.), Genetic Modification of Plants, Biotechnology in Agriculture and Forestry 64, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-02391-0_26, # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010
553
554
Y. Devos et al.
nutritional, and/or processing quality). By performing wide crosses and extensive backcrosses, genetic variation has been increased, whilst novel traits have been introgressed into food crops. More recently, plant biotechnology-based breeding techniques such as plant cell and tissue culture have helped plant breeders in obtaining fertile generations from normally sterile crossings, which has enabled the transfer of desired traits between crops and more distantly related plant species. The problem of desired traits lacking within a plant species or within distantly related plant species has been overcome through chemical and irradiation mutagenesis, as both techniques induce mutants that might have the desired characteristics. Chemicals have been used not only to gene
Data Loading...
