Assuring the Food Safety of Crops Developed through Breeding

Abstract

Breeding as a means to select improved plant varieties has benefited food security for millennia. Breeders rely on a plant species' genetic diversity to develop new varieties that will meet the changing agronomic needs of growers, the functional and quality end points required by food processors and a multitude of end-user demands on sensory characteristics, convenience, and price. The history of safe use of crops for food and feed, combined with breeding practices designed to eliminate plants that do not meet performance or safety standards, has successfully enabled introduction of new varieties on a continuous basis. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has primary oversight of the safety of all plant-based foods including those from new plant varieties. In response to the use of recombinant DNA techniques to introduce modification in plants not possible through traditional breeding, FDA issued a policy statement in 1992 that outlines key considerations for safety evaluation of foods derived from new plant varieties. This includes the history of safe use of the crop and the donor organism from which any new genetic or protein sequences are derived and safety assessment of any newly introduced proteins or changes to the levels of key nutrients or toxins. As understanding of plant genetics has deepened, new breeding tools have become available. Genome editing is one of the latest classes of these new breeding tools that allows plant breeders to target gene loci to create deletions that inactivate gene(s), make modifications that enhance the function of a particular gene or move genes within a gene pool, harnessing existing genetic diversity from within a plant species and its sexually compatible relatives. FDA's authority and specific guidance continues to be relevant for safety assessment of foods derived from these new plant varieties. copy; 2022 American Chemical Society.