Compositional Analysis of Genetically Modified (GM) Crops: Key Issues and Future Needs

Effective symposia need two strong legs to stand upon: informative presentations of recent research paired with lively discussion of these topics. Although it is easy for the organizers of a symposium to predict the usefulness of the former, as they select the speakers and their topic areas, guaranteeing productive discussion is a far more difficult task. For the Crop Composition Workshop sponsored by the International Life Sciences Institutes Committee on Food and Biotechnology (ILSI IFBIC), the organizers scheduled four roundtable discussions with preselected questions and with rapporteurs drawn from governmental organizations and public-sector research institutes (the authors). It was also the organizers intent to let these discussions flow on the basis of the experiences of the participants and pressing issues within the overall debate on the role of crop compositional analysis within safety assessment of biotechnology as it exists now and in the future. The goal of this perspective is to summarize the issues raised, providing references when possible, and to describe the consensus statements reached through the course of these discussions.