Novel plant breeding techniques

Several new plant breeding techniques that make use of a genetic modification step somewhere in the production of improved plant lines have been developed in the last decennium. Consequently all these techniques fall under the European Directive 2001/18/EC.
The plant breeding techniques that are described in the research report are: agroinfiltration, virus induced gene silencing, reverse breeding, accelerated breeding, grafting, cisgenesis, intragenesis and oligonucleotide-mediated mutation induction. A common feature of these techniques is that they all lead to end products (plants or plant parts) that are free of genes that are foreign to the species. This report describes the consequences of these plant breeding techniques for the environment and food feed safety in comparison to a baseline. This baseline is often defined specifically for a technique and covers the ‘natural situation’ in its full bandwidth.

This report was commissioned by COGEM. The contents of this publication are the sole responsibility of the authors. The contents of this publication may in no way be taken to represent the views of COGEM.