Assists policymakers in evaluating the appropriate scientific methods for detecting unintended changes in food and assessing the potential for adverse health effects from genetically modified products. In this book, the committee recommended that greater scrutiny should be given to foods containing new compounds or unusual amounts of naturally occurring substances, regardless of the method used to create them. The book offers a framework to guide federal agencies in selecting the route of safety assessment. It identifies and recommends several pre- and post-market approaches to guide the assessment of unintended compositional changes that could result from genetically modified foods and research avenues to fill the knowledge gaps.

Genetically engineered (GE) crops were first introduced commercially in the 1990s. After two decades of production, some groups and individuals remain critical of the technology based on their concerns about possible adverse effects on human health, the environment, and ethical considerations. At the same time, others are concerned that the technology is not reaching its potential to improve human health and the environment because of stringent regulations and reduced public funding to develop products offering more benefits to society. While the debate about these and other questions related to the genetic engineering techniques of the first 20 years goes on, emerging genetic-engineering technologies are adding new complexities to the conversation. Genetically Engineered Crops builds on previous related Academies reports published between 1987 and 2010 by undertaking a retrospective examination of the purported positive and adverse effects of GE crops and to anticipate what emerging genetic-engineering technologies hold for the future. This report indicates where there are uncertainties about the economic, agronomic, health, safety, or other impacts of GE crops and food, and makes recommendations to fill gaps in safety assessments, increase regulatory clarity, and improve innovations in and access to GE technology.

This series looks at developments, inventions and discoveries in science and how a discovery or invention by one individual acn lead to a series of discoveries by others and even a chain of scientific breakthroughs. Each book charts a few connected developments in the particular field of science from first discoveries through to current applications.

This 1985 book describes techniques in plant genetic research and the practical application of genetic engineering for molecular biologists.

"The book...is, in fact, a short text on the many practical problems...associated with translating the explosion in basic biotechnological research into the next Green Revolution," explains Economic Botany. The book is "a concise and accurate narrative, that also manages to be interesting and personal...a splendid little book." Biotechnology states, "Because of the clarity with which it is written, this thin volume makes a major contribution to improving public understanding of genetic engineering's potential for enlarging the world's food supply...and can be profitably read by practically anyone interested in application of molecular biology to improvement of productivity in agriculture."

Understanding the physical and genetic structure of cereal genomes and how defined coding and non-coding regions interact with the environment to determine a phenotype are key to the future of plant breeding and agriculture. The production and characteri- tion of transgenic plants is a powerful reverse genetic strategy increasingly used in cereals research to ascribe function to defined DNA sequences. However, the techniques and resources required to conduct these investigations have, until recently, been difficult to achieve or totally lacking in wheat, barley and oat. This book brings together the l- est protocols for the transformation, regeneration and selection using both biolistic and Agrobacterium tumefaciens appropriate for these three species. It includes two chapters describing in vitro Agrobacterium co-cultivation, one leading to germ line transformation with no need for tissue culture-based regeneration. In addition, it has several chapters dedicated to the manipulation of gene expression and characterisation of the recombinant locus and transgenic plants. Finally, it tackles the issues of GM risk assessment, field trials and substantial equivalence in terms of transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics. Although this book is dedicated to the temperate small grain cereals wheat, barley and oats, many of the techniques described could be readily adapted for other cereals or plants generally. We thank all the contributing authors for their timely and informative chapters, the staff of Humana Press, especially John Walker for their guidance, and Helen Jenkins for her proof-reading, word processing and administrative support. v Contents Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v Contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix PART I.

Argues against the biotech industry's claim that genetically modified (GM) foods are safe, identifying sixty-five health risks of the foods that Americans eat every day, and showing how official safety assessments on GM crops are not competent to identify the health problems involved, and how industry research is rigged to avoid finding problems.