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GMOs and genome editing – a need for new detection strategies

In light of the recent ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union that organisms obtained by new mutagenesis plant breeding techniques are genetically modified organisms (GMO), we give some insight into what this means for current detectability strategies. These new breeding techniques, mainly genome editing by oligo-directed mutagenesis and CRISPR-Cas, result in specific targeted alterations in the genome of an organism without introducing foreign DNA. Conventional mutagenesis techniques are exempted from GMO regulations, even though mutations induced by genome editing technologies cannot be distinguished from mutations induced by conventional mutagenesis or natural occurring mutations. This verdict raises multiple questions for official control laboratories, as well as competent authorities about the detection of food products obtained by gene editing techniques. The main questions to be answered are: Do food products originate from natural, spontaneous mutations or from mutagenesis? In case of mutagenesis, which technique is used, conventional or genome editing? The current method of choice is real-time polymerase chain reaction (real-time PCR). Laboratories have diverse screening strategies targeting common sequences used in introducing transgenic DNA in a plant genome. For genome editing, sequence based screening is needed, which is more time consuming, expensive and requires genome data management services and bioinformatics expertise. For products of genome editing to be detected and identified by control laboratories, prior knowledge of the altered sequence is needed, together with a validated method and a reference material. Also, pan- genome databases of all sequence variation in a species is needed to compare with the detected sequences.

EU legislation ; laboratories ; mutagenesis ; new breeding techniques ; real-time PCR

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