著者
新名 惇彦
出版者
日本応用糖質科学会
雑誌
Journal of Applied Glycoscience (ISSN:13447882)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.50, no.2, pp.345-349, 2003-04-20 (Released:2010-06-28)
参考文献数
4

World population reached 6.1 billion in 2002 and it will become 9.5-10 billion in 2050. Programs for increasing crop yield are (1) Expansion of arable land, (2) Increase of yield per unit area, and (3) Plant breeding, but the former 2 programs can not be expected. The remaining possibility is plant breeding, i.e., development of high-yield and high-quality varieties and exploitation of stress-tolerant plants for extensive farming. Various physical and biological environmental stresses reduce the productivity of plants by 80% even in US. Traditional plant breeding by crossing requires at least a decade to establish improvement of one trait. Only one possible solution is a molecular breeding of plants. Transgenic crops with characters of herbicide-, insect-, and virus-resistance, long-life, high oleic and lauric acids content were produced. Safety assessment ofgenetically modified plants as food and feed is judged in various aspects. a) Effect of gene disruption on productionof toxic compounds. b) Transfer of maker gene, such as antibiotics-resistant gene, to intestinal microbes. c) Toxicity and allergen of foreign protein. These items were carefully studied by chemical analysis of transgenic plants, sequence of transgene, comparison of structure of transgene product (protein) with known toxic proteins and allergenic proteins, digestibility of proteins in stomach and intestine, and animal test. In conclusion, foods and feeds from transgenic plants so far certificated were substantially identical to usual foods and feeds.