Transgenic plants: some current issues

Abstract

Transgenic plants have already been produced in about 60 plant species. A number of these transgenic crop plants, carrying genes for traits of economic importance have either been released or are ready to be released for commercial cultivation. With the success of these transgenic plants, the following three issues are being widely discussed; (a) biosafety of growing these transgenic plants; (b) transgene silencing or inactivation induced due to homology between. multiple copies of transgeneslendogenous genes and (c) intellectual property rights (IPRs) involved in commercializing these transgenic plants, particularly the broad patents. These three issues have been discussed in this article in some detail, using suitable examples and citing relevant literature on these issues published in recent years.