Safety Assessment and Regulations for Food Ingredients Derived from Plant In Vitro Systems

Abstract

Plant cell and tissue cultures present numerous advantages for the production of food ingredients. This technology has made a great progress in the past two decades, with a few examples of products reaching the market. Safety assessment of plant in vitro products is a key issue for the development of sustainable commercial processes. Experts have proposed various strategies and methods for assessing the potential risks for the end product arising from the production processes, and throughout the years these have been implemented as guidelines and national regulations. The international approach in safety assessment of single chemically defined plant and cell culture food ingredients is based on the concept of substantial equivalence developed for other categories for novel food products. For products in the form of complex mixtures, conventional metabolism and toxicokinetic studies should be provided for toxicologically relevant constituents with known or demonstrable biological or toxicological activity on a case-by-case basis. The present chapter gives an overview of the current international regulatory basis and proposed schemes for the safety assessment of plant cell and tissue culture-derived food ingredient with some suggestions for the future needs in this field.