Food Safety - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 599

Recently, new analytical technologies called “-Omic” technologies have been devel-
oped Chassy, 2010). The principal omic technologies allow investigators to determine
which specific genes are being expressed in an organism (transcriptomics); which pro-
teins are present in cells, organs, or tissues (proteomics); or which metabolites are pres-
ent (metabolomics). Although these methods have proven to be powerful research tools
for comparison of cells or tissues, there are limitations. The methods are not standard-
ized, there is no uniform methodology for reporting and analysis, and it is difficult to
repeat and/or compare results from different laboratories. As of now, omic methods are
very effective at measuring many analytes poorly, because analyte concentrations are not
precisely, accurately, and reproducibly measured (Chassy, 2010; Harrigan and Chassy,
2012). It has been suggested that omic methods might enhance the safety assessment of
GM foods by allowing assessors to compare the entire compositional profile, the pro-
teins, and the levels of gene expression between a new variety and a parental strain. Yet it
is clear that omictechnologies are not yet ready to apply to safety assessment; moreover
no good case has been made that currently accepted methods of compositional analysis
are inadequate.
Although omic profiling is not a useful technology for safety assessment, it can be a
powerful tool for identifying differences between two or more samples. An analysis of 44
published comparisons of omic profiles obtained with conventional varieties and their
transgenic counterparts revealed that transgenic crops profiles are more similar to those
observed for the parental strain than are those collected for other cultivars of the same
crop plant (Ricroch at al. 2011). The best explanation for this observation is that trans-
gene insertion brings about fewer unintended changes in metabolomes, proteomes, and
transcriptomes than does conventional breeding. This conclusion is consistent with an
extensive published literature on compositional differences between transgenic and
conventionally bred varieties of numerous crops, which confirms that transgene inser-
tion has less impact on composition than do other modalities of plant breeding (Ricroch
et al., 2011; Herman et al. 2009; Herman and Price, 2013). These observations provide
strong support for the conclusion that fewer unintended changes are associated with
transgenic breeding than with conventional breeding. This is perhaps why several recent
publications have suggested that compositional analysis of transgenic crops is not scien-
tifically justified unless there is a specific hypothesis to test, for example, when composi-
tion has been deliberately changed (Herman et al. 2009; Herman and Price, 2013).
Protein Safety, Food Allergy, and
Allergens
Since modern biotechnology allows genes to be moved from almost any organism into
crop plants, it is, in principle, possible that a gene(s) that encode toxin(s) or allergen(s)
could be introduced into foods in which they would not normally occur. There are