Transgenic crops: Current challenges and future perspectives

Genetically modified (GM) crops are now being grown extensively in North and South America and China, although not in Europe. Food produced from these crops has become a part of the normal diet in North and South America and in China, but not in Europe, where contention continues despite the fact that millions of US citizens eat GM soya without any ill effects in a very litigious society, and many Europeans have eaten GM soya while in the US without any adverse consequences. > Why has the British public, who normally so pragmatically welcome scientific advances, resisted the introduction of genetically modified crops? European consumers' continuous and ardent opposition to GM crops and foods has had serious repercussions for plant research, for the commercial development of new crops and, most importantly, for developing countries that could benefit most from GM crops. Several countries in Africa and elsewhere have resisted growing such crops, mainly for fear of being unable to export them to the European market ( The Economist , 2002). It is therefore worthwhile to investigate what actually went wrong in the debate about GM food and crops in Europe and how these foods have earned such a bad name. Such an analysis could not only help to overcome public fears of this technology, but also help scientists and policy makers to address similar concerns in the future, such as the growing debate over nanotechnology. The concerns of European consumers about the potential health and environmental threats of GM crops have resulted in an unprecedented effort to investigate those anxieties and communicate with the wider public, particularly in the UK, where the use of public consultation has been extensively developed. The first of these initiatives was the extensive Farm Scale Evaluations of three GM crops (herbicide‐resistant beet, oil seed rape and maize), whose …

Ethics and Transgenic Crops: a Review

Ethics and transgenic crops: a review

Genetic Engineering of Crop Plants: Colombia as a Case Study

When will agricultural biotechnologies, such as genetically modified (GM) crops, reach Europe? This was the main question at the Agricultural Biotechnology International Conference (ABIC)—the largest of its kind—that took place in September this year in Cologne, Germany. Given that the ABIC was accompanied by a parallel conference organized by critics of GM crops and foods, this is an appropriate question. Most of the European Union (EU) member states have not yet approved the GM crops that are used widely and safely elsewhere in the world. Moreover, although the EU has finally lifted its moratorium on GM crops, and has passed new regulations for growing and marketing GM foods, national politics, legislation and ideological views about consumer and environmental protection have further hampered their use. European consumers remain wary of agricultural biotechnology and its products, as they do not see any direct benefits from GM crops and are, therefore, understandably reluctant to accept them. But it is only a matter of time before GM foods arrive on supermarket shelves across Europe, predicts Ashley O'Sullivan, President and CEO of Ag‐West Bio Inc. (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada). “The reality for legislation to regulate agricultural biotechnology is that the train has left the station and there is no way of going back,” he added. > …to convince the cautious European public, agricultural biotechnology still has to […] offer products that directly benefit consumers But to convince the cautious European public, agricultural biotechnology still has to show that it can do more than increase the returns to farmers, and offer products that directly benefit consumers. The next wave of GM plants, which are currently being developed and tested in academic and industry laboratories around the world, including Europe, may soon do this. A range of new GM crops in the research pipeline will offer direct benefits to …

Genetic engineering of crop plants has been in progress since the dawn of agriculture, about 10 000 years ago. For millennia the genetic make-up of our crop plants has been changed by mankind's selection of naturally occurring variants. As the trade routes were developed, novel plant types were introduced into new environments and provided more variation from which to choose. At the end of the nineteenth century an understanding of the laws of heredity was gained and plant breeding protocols were devised whereby selection became accompanied by deliberate crossing. As the knowledge of the genetic structure of crop plants improved, new ways of manipulation were invented and exploited. Indeed plant breeding became a testing bed for new ideas in genetics. For the plant breeder the techniques which were most widely employed in the past were those which aided breeding, for example techniques which speeded up the production of new varieties, but still used traditional routes of crossing and selection. This was a transitional phase between plant breeding as an art and plant breeding as a science.

Agricultural production is severely affected by various abiotic stresses including drought. Development of crop plants tolerant to drought is an urgent need to increase crop productivity to feed the growing population. It is imperative to understand the adaptive mechanism of plants to drought especially the type and expression levels of drought responsive genes. Several genes upregulated during abiotic stress have been exploited to develop drought tolerant plants. Genetic engineering of crop plants with stress responsive genes has been an effective method of generating drought tolerant plants. But expressions of these stress responsive genes are regulated by several transcription factors (TFs). TFs are DNA binding proteins that bind to the specific sequence motif and modulate the levels of gene expression. They may function as an activator, or repressor for the expression of specific genes. Transgenic plants expressing drought responsive TFs have been shown to improve drought tolerance in many crop plants. In this review, we have discussed the details on TFs used for developing various transgenic plants and also analyzed the potential of TFs for further transgenic studies. The future direction to exploit TFs for sustainable crop production under drought is also highlighted.

Genetic engineering of crop plants for insect resistance – a critical review

Genetic engineering of crops as potential source of genetic hazard in the human diet

Recently, genetically modified (GM) technology has been successfully used to reduce the cost and to enhance the profit in agriculture. Although GM technology brings many benefits for non-food crops, people still misgive the effects of GM products for the health and the environment. Furthermore, GM crops might affect food (non-GM) crops in the open environment. Hence, how to find strategies for the coexistence of GM and non-GM crops are become a popular issue. One of the strategies is to determine a befitting distance between GM and non-GM crops to reduce the cross-pollination occurred by predicting the rate of cross-pollination. Owing to most of the existing methods for predicting the cross-pollination rates of non-GM crops are only based on the distance between GM and non-GM crops. To counter this problem, we propose a hybrid method, which is composed of radial basis function neural network (RBFNN), support vector machine (SVM) and bootstrap, to apply in this issue. The proposed method includes three specificities. (a) The proposed method reduces the effect of imbalance class problem. (b) The proposed method uses more variables, which are effect the cross-pollination rates, for prediction to enhance the prediction accuracy. (c) The proposed method searches relevant samples to reduce execution time and enhance the prediction accuracy. The results show the performance of our method is better than the existing methods in terms of the root mean square error (RMSE) in prediction and the correlation coefficient between the actual and the predicted cross-pollination rates.

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are organisms whose genetic material (DNA) has been artificially modified by using genetic engineering techniques to enhance and altered their characteristics. Genetic engineering plays a significant role in the development of transgenic crops. The four crops canola, maize, cotton, and soybean are the most common ones to use GM crop technology, which has been used extensively for more than 20 years in a variety of nations. The two most significant GM crops in Pakistan are cotton and maize, both of which are resistant to weeds and insects. The impact studies of insect-resistant and herbicide-tolerant crops that are already available demonstrate the advantages of these techniques for both producers and consumers, as well as their favorable effects on both the environment and public health. Additionally, GM crops are a treatment for famine and malnutrition. Future uses may perhaps provide even greater benefits. Implementing an integrated strategy to pest management will be essential for food security, agricultural stability, and protection of the environment as the global population increases. Crops that have been genetically modified (GE) offer resistance to herbicides or protection from pests and diseases. Technology significantly decreases pest damage and improves crop production. As in the case of Bt cotton, pest-resistant genetically modified crops can support higher yields and agricultural development. We provide a thorough update on the status of the cultivated genetically modified (GM) crops in this paper. We address some vector based techniques for modification and some new approaches of transgene transfer without microbial vector insertion into recipient species In order to reduce the hazards associated with microbial vectors.

BackgroundThe safety assessment of foods and feeds from genetically modified (GM) crops includes the comparison of key characteristics, such as crop composition, agronomic phenotype and observations from animal feeding studies compared to conventional counterpart varieties that have a history of safe consumption, often including a near isogenic variety. The comparative compositional analysis of GM crops has been based on targeted, validated, quantitative analytical methods for the key food and feed nutrients and antinutrients for each crop, as identified by Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OCED). As technologies for untargeted metabolomic methods have evolved, proposals have emerged for their use to complement or replace targeted compositional analytical methods in regulatory risk assessments of GM crops to increase the number of analyzed metabolites.Aim of ReviewThe technical opportunities, challenges and strategies of including untargeted metabolomics analysis in the comparative safety assessment of GM crops are reviewed. The results from metabolomics studies of GM and conventional crops published over the last eight years provide context to enable the discussion of whether metabolomics can materially improve the risk assessment of food and feed from GM crops beyond that possible by the Codex-defined practices used worldwide for more than 25 years.Key Scientific Concepts of ReviewPublished studies to date show that environmental and genetic factors affect plant metabolomics profiles. In contrast, the plant biotechnology process used to make GM crops has little, if any consequence, unless the inserted GM trait is intended to alter food or feed composition. The nutritional value and safety of food and feed from GM crops is well informed by the quantitative, validated compositional methods for list of key analytes defined by crop-specific OECD consensus documents. Untargeted metabolic profiling has yet to provide data that better informs the safety assessment of GM crops than the already rigorous Codex-defined quantitative comparative assessment. Furthermore, technical challenges limit the implementation of untargeted metabolomics for regulatory purposes: no single extraction method or analytical technique captures the complete plant metabolome; a large percentage of metabolites features are unknown, requiring additional research to understand if differences for such unknowns affect food/feed safety; and standardized methods are needed to provide reproducible data over time and laboratories.

In this chapter, we first define what is meant by plant biotechnology. We then trace the history from its earliest beginnings rooted in traditional plant biotechnology, followed by classical plant biotechnology, and, currently, modern plant biotechnology. Plant biotechnology is now center stage in the fields of alternative energy involving biogas production, bioremediation that cleans up polluted land sites, integrative medicine that involves the use of natural products for treatment of human diseases, sustainable agriculture that involves practices of organic farming, and genetic engineering of crop plants that are more productive and effective in dealing with biotic and abiotic stresses. The primary toolbox of biotechnology utilizes the latest methods of molecular biology, including genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and systems biology. It aims to develop economically feasible production of specifically designed plants that are grown in a safe environment and brought forth for agricultural, medical, and industrial applications.

Introduction:Genetically modified (GM) crop species were proven to be a solution for the increasing food consumption in many countries. The cultivation of transgenic plants is increasing from time to time. In 2017 alone, 27 different genetically modified (GM) crop species were produced in 40 countries.Explanation:Biotechnology is revolutionizing science, promising to solve hunger, malnutrition and production demands of industrial raw materials from plants. However, there are biosafety concerns that GM crops may have unintended and hazardous impacts on living organisms well-being and environment both on target and non-target organisms. To tackle such potential problems many countries are implementing international as well as national biosafety regulations. America, Brazil, Belgium, China and India are among the top GM crop users in the world, whereas Egypt, Sudan, South Africa and Burkina Faso are leading GM crop producers in Africa. Ethiopia has also developed its own policy and biosafety regulations for biotechnology products.Conclusion:The Ethiopian government has given due attention to GM crops as a tool for the transformation of agricultural productivity and quality. Before a couple of years, Bt cotton (cotton containing toxic protein fromBacillus thuringiensis) has been introduced to Ethiopia and is expected to bring fundamental change in the production of fibers for the textile industries and also will have crucial consequence to the forthcoming use of the modern biotechnological Science in the country. The introduction of Bt cotton is a typical example worth mentioning here which shows a relative flexibility of the current Ethiopian biosafety regulation. This paper reviews the possible challenges and opportunities of using GM crops in Ethiopia.

The benefits of genetic engineering of crop plants to improve the reliability and quality of the world food supply have been contrasted with public concerns raised about the food safety of the resulting products. Debates have concentrated on the possible unforeseen risks associated with the accumulation of new metabolites in crop plants that may contribute to toxins, allergens and genetic hazards in the human diet. This review examines the various molecular and biochemical mechanisms by which new hazards may appear in foods as a direct consequence of genetic engineering in crop plants. Such hazards may arise from the expression products of the inserted genes, secondary or pleiotropic effects of transgene expression, and random insertional mutagenic effects resulting from transgene integration into plant genomes. However, when traditional plant breeding is evaluated in the same context, these mechanisms are no different from those that have been widely accepted from the past use of new cultivars in agriculture. The risks associated with the introduction of new genes via genetic engineering must be considered alongside the common breeding practice of introgressing large fragments of chromatin from related wild species into crop cultivars. The large proportion of such introgressed DNA involves genes of unknown function linked to the trait of interest such as pest or disease resistance. In this context, the potential risks of introducing new food hazards from the applications of genetic engineering are no different from the risks that might be anticipated from genetic manipulation of crops via traditional breeding. In many respects, the precise manner in which genetic engineering can control the nature and expression of the transferred DNA offers greater confidence for producing the desired outcome compared with traditional breeding.