Past activities 2010 - 2012

Dear participants in the Network of Laboratories for LMO Detection & Identification,

As you may recall, in the spring of this year we had a series of online discussions through the Biosafety Clearing-House as part of the Network. We closed the discussions in June with a promise to open them later in the year.

I thus wanted to advise you that we will be re-starting the discussion groups beginning next week, Monday, November 19th. We will start by re-opening the discussion group on “experiences detecting transgenes in wild relatives”. This is an important topic but there was not a great deal of exchange on it when it was discussed previously.

I have pasted the description of the theme below and I would encourage you to prepare your thoughts on this subject and share them through the discussion group next week.

We will also send a reminder message next Monday once the discussions on the theme have been opened.

Furthermore, the discussion group on suggestions for future themes remains open for your ideas: http://bch.cbd.int/onlineconferences/portal_art18/htpi_discussiongroups.shtml. We intend to have further discussion topics leading into a workshop of representatives of LMO detection and identification laboratories to be held in 2013. In order to ensure that the workshop responds to your needs, we would be very interested in hearing the issues and concerns you face in the detection and identification of LMOs.

Best wishes,
Kathryn Garforth


Theme 4: Experiences detecting transgenes in wild relatives

One of the suggested topics for discussion was for participants to share experiences and challenges with the detection of transgenes and/or their proteins in wild relatives. It was pointed out that this is a theme that the environmental authorities need to consider because it sometimes presents difficulties in detection. We encourage participants to post information on their experiences and any challenges with this issue. Some aspects to consider include:

• When to seek to detect whether transgenes have introgressed into wild relatives;
• Different approaches to detecting transgenes in wild relatives depending on the native biodiversity of an area (e.g. centre of origin, the presence of closely-related wild relatives to the living modified organism);
• How to conduct sampling in the field;
• How to adapt DNA- and protein-based tests commonly used for crops to wild relatives;
• How to report results.