Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
600
400
Salt stress
Temperature stress
Water stress
General, abio
c, or
environmental stress
200
0
a
600
400
Hor
cultural
Oilseeds
Grains
Forage & Forestry
200
0
b
Fig. 1.5
Trends in transgenic field trials.
a
by type of stress traits;
b
by type of crops
tions, with some entrepreneurs conducting a significant share of field trials in select
areas. Two companies, Performance Plants (Kingston, Ontario) and MS Technolo-
gies (Ames, Iowa), are working on stress tolerance in canola and soybeans respec-
tively, largely licensing traits to major corporations for final integration and com-
mercialization. Others are focused in areas apparently of no interest to corporations,
like horticulture and forestry. For example, a Canadian winery, Chateau des Charms
(Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario), is developing cold-tolerant grape vines,and Arbor-
Gen (Summerville, South Carolina) is developing cold-tolerant eucalyptus hybrids.
3.4 Activity at the Regulatory Stage: Regulatory Submissions
At the regulatory stage, only a small trickle of activity has begun in the last few
years (Fig.
1.2d
), with the first regulatory filings, for approval of drought-tolerant
maize, being made 10 years after field trials related to stress tolerance were first
conducted. As an R&D indicator, regulatory filings share the same obvious disad-
vantage as transgenic field trials data, in that they cover only transgenic varieties.
