환경위해성 평가를 고려한 GM작물의 개발 전략 (I)

Strategies for the development of GM crops in accordance with the environmental risk assessment (I)

Environmental risk assessment (RA) is essential prior to the environmental release of GM crops. RA, however, costs at least 7 to 15 million US dollars and requires several years to complete field tests. Therefore, it is strongly suggested that developers of GM crops must consider all criteria for RA at the beginning stage of the development if it aims for commercialization. Previous review papers have pointed out that the death valley for the commercialization of GM crops is the screening stage of early GM events since many candidates are given up due to insufficient data on the molecular characterization of a GM event such as inserted gene`s copy number, position of inserted site of a chromosome, flanking sequence of recombinant T-DNA, rearrangement of chromosome, and knock out of endogenous gene of host plant. Recently, Rural Development Administration (RDA) in South Korea has launched a Grand National Project named as 「Next Generation of BioGreen 21 Project」 from 2011 to 2020 and research funding for the development of global GM crops has been allocated to accelerate the commercialization of GM crops. In this regard, I strongly suggest that researchers involved in the development of GM crops for commercialization must conduct RA by themselves at the screening stage of pre-GM event based on the data for molecular characterization.