The future

The commercial future of transgenic potatoes will clearly depend on end user ‘pull’ and the demand for distinct added value that these crops might provide. Such added value will be derived from reduced production and processing costs without yield penalties, improved quality and nutritional value, novel uses (diversification) and/or proven environmental benefits. It is clear that the benefits must be transparent to consumers who have increasing expectations with regard to food safety. The demands of growers and consumers will vary with geographical location and quality of life and a key challenge will be to provide proven biotechnological advances, technologies and products to the developing world at low, or zero costs, whilst maintaining profitability (and altruism) within the industrial sector. Due to research and development costs this will be sustainable only if GM crops find their niche in global marketplaces.

At present, Europe is a desert for GM crops and market resistance is evident in North America. NatureMark^® products have figured significantly in this section since they have been the only company to place GM potato crops on the market. The demise of NatureMark^® due to market forces may be seen as an opportunity by others to fill the gap. The number of mergers between plant biotechnology companies has been significant in recent a year which potentially creates the ‘monopolies’ that many campaigners against GM crops would not wish to see. However, in the current climate the development of GM crops and products derived from them will require the ‘patient money’ that only large multinationals can provide whilst satisfying shareholder demands through other components of their business. Due to the costs involved, opportunities for public sector research establishments to deliver GM crops to the market without strategic alliances with companies will be minimal to say the least. These are the realities; the industrial sector needs to make profit and the public sector needs to work closely with the industrial sector. However, this must not jeopardize independence, particularly where risk assessment is involved.

The implementation of stringent risk assessment and risk management strategies together with labelling and traceability has become an important issue with the public. The recent revision of European legislation goes some way down this road. Scientifically, one can predict an increased use in risk assessment of micro-arrays for large scale analysis of gene expression and proteomics and metabolic profiling for more detailed analysis of substantial equivalencies. Combined use of these approaches will also make major contributions to our understanding of metabolic networks and signal transduction mechanisms which govern important plant and crop traits. The explosion of sequence information delivered through genomics programmes will enable expression analysis on entire potato transcriptomes in the very near future, opening up immense research opportunities and challenges in information technology.

One can predict the development of more efficient transformation systems, advances in transgene stacking to regulate several traits simultaneously (or traits which are under polygenic control) and to provide durable, multigene resistances to pests and diseases. There is already a move towards the use of transformation vectors which are ‘minimal’ in the use of DNA sequences not required for the transformation event and which do not contain antibiotic resistance marker genes. The technologies are also available to sequence the regions bordering inserted sequences in the target plant. This would give information on potential disruption to important gene elements and might assist the targeting of metabolite analysis in a risk assessment exercise. However, it should be emphasised that the risk assessment procedures currently applied to GM crops are already far more rigorous than for any crops generated by traditional or mutation breeding.