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Plant breeding involving genetic engineering does not result in unacceptable unintended effects in rice relative to conventional cross-breeding

 

Before commerialization, genetically engineered (GE) crops are required to go through rigorous evaluation. The common concerns are focused on the potential adverse effects to natural environment or human health. Sources of potential harms caused by GE plants can be divided into two broad categories, i.e., intended changes and unintended changes. Since the intended changes in a GE plant concern the in-troduced genetic material and the related desired trait, the associated risks can, in general, be anticipated and assessed. In contrast, unintended changes can hardly be anticipated and are difficult to be detected raising caution when assessing the risk of GE plants. Advancements in -omics techniques have provided powerful tools to as-sess whether genetic engineering causes unintended changes in plants that go be-yond those introduced by conventionally plant breeding. Recently, researchers at the State Key Laboratory for Biology of Plant Diseases and Insect Pests, IPP-CAAS have published a research paper in the Plant Journal, in which the extent of transcriptome and metabolome modification oc-curring in leaves of four GE rice lines expressing Bacillus thurin-giensis (Bt) genes that devel-oped by genetic engineering and seven rice lines developed by conventional cross-breeding were compared.

The results showed that both types of crop breeding methods can bring changes at transcriptomic and metabolic levels, but the differences were comparable between the two methods. Metabolome profiling analysis found several new metabolites in GE rice lines when compared with the closest non-GE parental lines, but these com-pounds were also found in several of the conventionally bred rice lines. Functional analyses suggested that the differentially expressed genes and metabolites caused by both genetic engineering and conventional cross-breeding do not involve detri-mental metabolic pathways. The study successfully employed RNA-sequencing and HPLC-MS technologies to assess unintended changes in new rice varieties, and the results imply that genetic engineering does not cause unintended effects that go be-yond conventional cross-breeding in rice.




Copyright:Institute of Plant Protection,Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences 

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