Profiling of Genetically Modified Organisms Using Omics Technologies

Abstract

Strict regulations including risk assessment, labeling, traceability and marketing have been established due to the controversial safety aspects of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).One of the main polemic issues associated with GMOs safety are the possible unintended effects, defined as effects that go beyond the primary expected effects of the genetic modification. In order to effectively investigate the potential adverse effects on the human health, including the existence or not of unintended effects, new analytical tools are needed to facilitate comprehensive compositional studies of GMOs. In this context, profiling technologies have the potential to provide valuable information regarding GMOs composition that can be useful for characterization, traceability and even GMO detection. In this chapter, the application of the main -omics technologies (transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics) in combination with bioinformatics and chemometrics tools to GMO profiling are discussed.

Introductory Chapter: New Age Molecular Techniques in Plant Science

“…NGS technology is more sensitive than qPCR GMO detection to find out the existence of unknown GMOs. Integration of NGS to other new age molecular methods such as DNA walking opens a new window in GMO screening [30,[39][40][41][42].…”

The potential of metabolomics in assessing global compositional changes resulting from the application of CRISPR/Cas9 technologies

“…This approach exploited the concurrent development of omics technologies (transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics) and their ability to study any cellular changes at a holistic systems level. Thus, providing the opportunity to detect unpredicted effects, that could arise from the random insertion of transgenes or alteration to metabolism through the production of heterologous enzymes or modulation at protein level atypical to that routinely expressed in nature (Davies 2010;Valdés et al 2014;Misra et al 2019). The decades of data generated have led to the conclusion that GM crops are safe and have a history of use (Kok and Kuiper 2003;Conko et al 2016).…”

“…Con rmation of the target event is required and has prompted the development of genotyping techniques with varying advantages and disadvantages with regards to detection of mutations and off-targets induced by SSNs (Zischewski et al 2017). Furthermore, the transcriptomic studies identifying mutations and off-targets cannot always indicate the biological relevance of the changes, due to missing genome annotations (Davies 2010;Valdés et al 2014).…”