Assessment of risks and benefits deriving from the application of genetically modified organisms (gmos) and new breeding techniques (nbts) on the food chain

EU legislation on GMOs and NBTs aims to ensure a high level of protection of human, animal and environmental health and regulates the environmental release of GMOs or their application in the food chain. On the other hand, genetic engineering aims to improve productivity or reduce damage to food. GM-plants have shown the prospect of being able to fill the massive demand for food. GM-microbes have demonstrated their potential to contribute to plant growth by exerting greater bioremediation efficiency on polluted soils or by providing a greener and more economical strategy than those actually adopted. The direct application of GM-microorganisms is, instead, directed to improve food production through the contribution of enzymes, vitamins, or new food components.
The resulting representation clearly led to the EU and EFSA request for a detailed risk assessment (RA) before validating the large-scale application of a novel GMO.

A detailed workflow will follow:

• From the current literature, a series of keywords useful to identify the search field will be defined.
• Keywords will be combined differently with additional terms and their variants (e.g., microbes/bacteria/microorganisms or fungi/molds/yeasts) in order to achieve the widest panel of articles exploring the research field.
• Boolean operators and MESH terms will be used to obtain pipelines for searching for articles in different databases (MedLine, Scopus, WoS).
• The resulting database of articles will be manually checked for bias from search, replicas, and/or irrelevant articles.
• The final list of articles will be designed to critically discuss actual progress in this field of research.

The evidence obtained from the meticulous article collection will provide a critical overview and assessment of the risks and benefits deriving from the application GMOs and NBTs in the agri-food chain.