Breeding Crops For Enhanced Food Safety

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.

Preface 1. Challenges and Opportunities of Food System 2. Food Safety Issues 3. Biotechnology and Foods 4. Benefits of Genetically Modified Foods 5. Safety of Genetically Modified Foods 6. Imperatives and Challenges for Rice Biotechnology 7. Evaluation of Food Safety 8. Recommended International Code of Practice - General Principles of Food Hygiene Bibliography Index

Access to food with enough calories and nutrients is a fundamental right of every human. The global population has exceeded 7.8 billion and is expected to pass 10 billion by 2055. Such rapid population increase presents a great challenge for food supply. More grain production is needed to provide basic calories for humans. Thus, it is crucial to produce 60-110% more food to fill the gap between food production and the demand of future generations. Meanwhile food nutritional values are of increasing interest to accommodate industrialized modern lives. The instability of food production caused by global climate change presents another great challenge. The global warming rate has become more rapid in recent decades, with more frequent extreme climate change including higher temperatures, drought, and floods. Our world faces various unprecedented scenarios such as rising temperatures, which causes melting glaciers and the resulting various biotic and abiotic stresses, ultimately leading to food scarcity. In these circumstances it is of utmost importance to examine the genetic basis and extensive utilization of germplasm to develop “climate resilient cultivars” through the application of plant breeding and biotechnological tools. Future crops must adapt to these new and unpredictable environments. Crop varieties resistant to biotic and abiotic stresses are also needed as plant disease, insects, drought, high- and low-temperature stresses are expected to be impacted by climate change. Thus, we need a food production system that can simultaneously satisfy societal demands and long-term development. Since the Green Revolution in the 1960s, farming has been heavily dependent on high input of nitrogen and pesticides. This leads to environmental pollution which is not sustainable in the long run. Therefore, a new breeding scheme is urgently needed to enable sustainable agriculture; including new strategies to develop varieties and crops that have high yield potential, high yield stability, and superior grain quality and nutrition while also using less consumption of water, fertilizer, and chemicals in light of environmental protection. While we face these challenges, we also have great opportunities, especially with flourishing developments in omics technologies. High-quality reference genomes are becoming available for a larger number of species, with some species having more than one reference genome. The genome-wide re-sequencing of diverse varieties enables the identification of core- and pan-genomes. An integration of omics data will enable a rapid and high-throughput identification of many genes simultaneously for a relevant trait. This will change our current research paradigm fundamentally from single gene analysis to pathway or network analysis. This will also expand our understanding of crop domestication and improvement. In addition, with the knowledge gained from omics data, in combination with new technologies like targeted gene editing, we can breed new varieties and crops for sustainable agriculture.

Plant molecular biology came to the fore in the early 1980s and there has been tremendous growth in the subject since then. The study of plant genes and genomes and the development of techniques for the incorporation of novel or modified genes into plants eventually led to the commercialisation of genetically modified (GM) crops in the mid-1990s. This was seen as the start of a biotechnological revolution in plant breeding. However, plant biotechnology has become one of the hottest debates of the age and, in Europe at least, one of the greatest challenges that plant scientists have ever faced. This book covers the history and development of the science and techniques that underpin plant biotechnology. It describes the GM crops that are or have been grown commercially around the world, including failures as well as successes, and the new varieties that are being developed. The safety record of GM crops is reviewed together with the legislation that has been adopted to cover their use. The book also deals with the concerns of consumers, the GM crop debate and the prospects for the technology. In the second edition, sections on current GM crops and future developments in plant biotechnology have been greatly expanded, while those on techniques, legislation and the GM crop debate have also been updated. The book is a concise, comprehensive and readable study that is accessible to a general readership with a scientific background but also provides useful information for the specialist.