Ecological Risks of Growing Genetically Modified Crops

Abstract

Genetic modification can become a major achievement to plant breeding. However, genetic modification differs from traditional breeding in that totally new traits—for example from unrelated organisms—can be added to plants at a high rate, and that these traits are usually introduced many at a time as precisely designed stacks of genes with their own regulating sequences. These differences demand that plants developed by genetic modification are risk assessed. The possible risks are that transgenic phenotypes with altered fitness could change in abundance in the ecosystem, with unwanted effects on other species and on ecosystem integrity or that the ecosystems are affected indirectly by the transgenic plants. The risk analysis should provide information about the following: (1) the possibility of transfer of the transgene by spontaneous crosses between crop and weedy or wild relatives, (2) fitness of the genetically modified crop as well as fitness of the crop relatives that received the transgene by introgression and (3) other types of transgene provoked interactions between the recipient plant and the environment. As an example of a risk analysis data are presented from the model genus Brassica.