Environmental risk assessment of impacts of transgenic events highly expressing bacterial gene.

Under the Japanese biosafety regulatory framework for transgenic plants, data for assessing a transgenic plant's impact on biodiversity must be submitted in order to obtain approval for a confined field trial. We recently reported the development of four novel transgenic clones expressing the bacterial () gene, i.e., codAH-1, codAH-2, codAN-1, and codAN-2, and evaluated their abiotic tolerance by semiconfined screen house trial cultivation. Here we evaluated the impacts of the transgenic clones on productivities of harmful substances from those clones to affect soil microorganisms and/or other plants in the environment. A comparison of the assessment data between the transgenic trees and non-transgenic comparators showed no significant difference in potential impacts on biodiversity. The results contribute to sound-science evidence ensuring substantial equivalence between transgenic and non-transgenic .