Environmental applications of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have received unprecedented inspection and evaluation. In recent decades, public valuation of the environment has increased, and public perceptions of the environmental impacts of agricultural technologies have changed. Agricultural technologies, which at one time escaped broad public consideration, now receive intense public scrutiny because of their potential adverse environmental effects. For instance, pesticides, sub-soil drainage, fertilizers, and the Green Revolution have been examined with increasing intensity, and GMOs are the most recent agricultural technology to attract public criticism in their evolving attitudes toward the environment. However, the breadth of the ongoing public discourse concerning GMOs is unprecedented in scope and timing. This is the first time that human health, environmental, and socio-economic considerations have been brought to bear in evaluating a technological innovation prior to commercialization.

For nearly all innovative biological technologies, thoughtful scientists have been acutely aware that application of these discoveries could have detrimental effects on humans or the environment, and have called for careful application of these new technologies. In the 1960s and 1970s, molecular biologists were in the forefront of asking the pertinent safety questions in their field, and seeking answers to these questions resulted in the NIH Guidelines for safe laboratory practice and safe cloning in Escherichia coli (Wright, 1994). Here improved knowledge made it possible to implement safe laboratory practices, and thus to benefit from the many medical and food processing innovations of genetic engineering. In the 1970s and 1980s, ecological scientists called for environmental safety evaluations for releases of GMOs into the environment (Sharples, 1983; Gillett et al., 1986; Tiedje et al., 1989). Improved understanding of GMOs intended for deliberate release plays a key role in making it possible to benefit more fully from GMOs, while mitigating or avoiding potential negative effects. Science-based assessment of GMOs is universally recognized as the essential foundation of national and international evaluation of GMO-based innovation, and this is the basis of the enormous challenge to the scientific community involved.

This prospective, interdisciplinary feature of the GMO discussion makes research in this area particularly interesting, but it has become increasingly difficult to follow new developments across this broad and actively growing domain. Although researchers will continue to publish in specialized journals, the principal objective of Environmental Biosafety Research (EBR) is to provide a common interdisciplinary ground for publication of results that are pertinent to the environmental safety and risk - in the broadest sense - of biotechnological innovations. This includes biological and socio-economic evaluations of environmental effects, and environmentally mediated effects on human health.

Our hope is that results published in EBR will help provide answers to current and future questions about the environmental effects of GMOs. Even when the current phase of debate has reached some scientific consensus, there will be a need for continued focus on biosafety research for at least two reasons. The currently available GMOs are modified for relatively simple traits, both genetically and phenotypically. When far more complex traits, such as resistance to salinity or drought, or modifications of entire metabolic pathways, are ready for evaluation, the scientific biosafety issues will likely be correspondingly complex. Also, public involvement in the decision-making process for commercial release of GMOs may deepen or spread to other environmental applications of biological technologies. This would raise new challenges to provide the solid scientific results necessary to satisfy the analysis called for by the public - and scientists as well - which we believe is a positive social good. EBR will be attentive to these possibilities, and expects to adapt to the shifting demands for scientific knowledge to support the decision making process regarding the use of any biological discovery in uncontained environments.

EBR begins its life as the official journal of a new learned society, the International Society for Biosafety Research (ISBR). These twin projects were conceived during 2000 at the 6th International Biosafety Symposium held in Saskatchewan, and their birth will be recognized at the 7th International Biosafety Symposium at Beijing on October 11-16, 2002. The linkage with the ISBR will guarantee that EBR will be able to publish forward-looking research with the necessary independence. Another essential element necessary for the success of EBR is active participation by the scientific community. We look forward with great anticipation to our intertwined development with ISBR and will take great pleasure in meeting you, as a member of ISBR, as a reader of our articles, and most importantly as an author who believes that appropriate use of biological innovation requires the highest standards of research.

The prospect of the deliberate environmental release of genetically manipulated microorganisms has given rise to a great deal of polemic. Amongst the rational scientific concerns are those concerned with the fate of the released bacteria, the fate of the recombinant genes that they carry, the selective pressures acting upon them in different environmental situations and the long term effects on the environment and human health. All recombinant DNA is carried by vectors (plasmids, transposons or bacteriophage or remnants of these). Thus the way in which recombinant constructions are made may itself lead to potential biosafety concerns, irrespective of the host bacterium and the recombinant DNA fragment of primary interest. The purpose of the present review is to assess progress in improved vector design aimed at eliminating risks due to the way recombinant vectors are constructed. Improved vector constructions include the avoidance of the use, or removal, of antibiotic resistance genes, the use of defective transposons rather than plasmids in order to reduce horizontal transfer and the development of conditionally lethal suicide systems. More recently, new site-specific recombination systems have permitted transposon vectors to be manipulated following strain construction, but before environmental release, so that virtually all recombinant DNA not directly involved in the release experiment is eliminated. Such bacteria are thus pseudo-wild type in that they contain no heterologous DNA other than the genes of interest.

The movement of transgenes from crops to weeds and the resulting consequences are concerns of modern agriculture. The possible generation of “superweeds” from the escape of fitness-enhancing transgenes into wild populations is a risk that is often discussed, but rarely studied. Oilseed rape, Brassica napus (L.), is a crop with sexually compatible weedy relatives, such as birdseed rape (Brassica rapa (L.)). Hybridization of this crop with weedy relatives is an extant risk and an excellent interspecific gene flow model system. In laboratory crosses, T3 lines of seven independent transformation events of Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) oilseed rape were hybridized with two weedy accessions of B. rapa. Transgenic hybrids were generated from six of these oilseed rape lines, and the hybrids exhibited an intermediate morphology between the parental species. The Bt transgene was present in the hybrids, and the protein was synthesized at similar levels to the corresponding independent oilseed rape lines. Insect bioassays were performed and confirmed that the hybrid material was insecticidal. The hybrids were backcrossed with the weedy parent, and only half the oilseed rape lines were able to produce transgenic backcrosses. After two backcrosses, the ploidy level and morphology of the resultant plants were indistinguishable from B. rapa. Hybridization was monitored under field conditions (Tifton, GA, USA) with four independent lines of Bt oilseed rape with a crop to wild relative ratio of 1200:1. When B. rapa was used as the female parent, hybridization frequency varied among oilseed rape lines and ranged from 16.9% to 0.7%.

To obtain information on differences between the metabolic pathways of the herbicide glufosinate (trade names: BASTA®, LIBERTY®) in non-transgenic, glufosinate-sensitive plants and in transgenic, glufosinate-resistant plants, the metabolism of 14C-labeled glufosinate and its enantiomers L- and D-glufosinate was studied using cell cultures of oilseed rape and corn. Transformation of glufosinate in both sensitive and transgenic rape cells remained at a low rate of about 3-10% in contrast to corn cells, where 20% was transformed in sensitive and 43% in transgenic cells after 14 days of incubation, the rest remaining as unchanged glufosinate. In sensitive rape and corn cells the main metabolite was 4-methylphosphinico-2-oxo-butanoic acid (PPO) with 7.3 and 16.4%, respectively, together with low amounts of 3-methylphosphinicopropionic acid (MPP), 4-methylphosphinico-2-hydroxybutanoic acid (MHB), 4-methylphosphinicobutanoic acid (MPB) and 2-methylphosphinicoacetic acid (MPA). An additional metabolite formed in transgenic cell cultures was 2-acetamido-4-methylbutanoic acid (N-acetyl-L-glufosinate, NGA), which was formed at rates of 3.2% in rape and 16.1% in corn. A further minor metabolite, not yet identified, was detected in both cell types. The liberation of 0.2% 14CO2 indicates further metabolic steps prior to a limited mineralization in plant cell cultures. L-glufosinate was transformed into the same metabolites as the glufosinate racemate. D-glufosinate was not metabolized.

In a field experiment with a susceptible population of annual wild carrot (Daucus carota) from Iran, artificial inoculations with the fungal pathogen A. dauci led to a strong and very significant increase of the diseased leaf area. The pathogen caused a very significant decrease in fecundity and seed survival of the host. This considerable fitness reduction by A. dauci would suggest that introgression of disease resistance from cultivated (transgenic) carrot cultivars into wild carrot populations could strongly increase the fitness of wild carrot. In spite of the potential ability of A. dauci to lower the fitness of the host considerably, wild carrot is very common in The Netherlands. Disease levels of wild carrot were estimated in 26 natural populations in 1998. No A. dauci could be detected on the leaves, and only 0.4% of the seeds were contaminated with A. dauci, in spite of the conducive weather for A. dauci. Resistance tests showed that all 26 monitored populations were highly resistant to A. dauci strains from The Netherlands. It is probable that the strong potential fitness reduction by A. dauci led to a high selection pressure towards resistance in The Netherlands. In conclusion, our results suggest that transgenic resistance to A. dauci would not be beneficial to wild carrot populations in The Netherlands because they are already resistant to this pathogen.

In this study, we evaluated in field trials the effects on non-target species, of transgenic corn producing the Cry1Ab toxin of Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). In 1998, we collected Ostrinia nubilalis (Hübner) larvae from transgenic Bt corn (Novartis Hybrid 176) and non-Bt corn at four geographical sites. We found a significant variation in parasitism by the tachinids Lydella thompsoni (Herting) and Pseudoperichaeta nigrolineata (Walker) among sites, and more parasitism in non-Bt than in Bt fields. The Bt effect did not vary significantly among fields. In 1999, we performed a field experiment at two sites, comparing the temporal abundance of non-target arthropods in Bt corn (Monsanto Hybrid MON810) and non-Bt corn. The non-target insects studied included the aphids Metopolophium dirhodum (Walker), Rhopalosiphum padi (L.) and Sitobion avenae (F.), the bug Orius insidiosus (Say), the syrphid Syrphus corollae (Meigen), the ladybird Coccinella septempunctata (L.), the lacewing Chrysoperla carnea (Stephens), thrips and hymenopteran parasitoids. For all species but one, the number of individuals varied greatly over the season but did not differ between the types of corn. The only exception was thrips which, at one site, was significantly more abundant in Bt corn than in non-Bt corn. However this difference did not remain significant when we took the multiple tests into account. Implications for pest resistance management, population dynamics and risk assessment are discussed.