Unintended effects of genetic modifications in plants and methods of their analysis

The problem of unintended effects caused by genetic modification of plants is analysed. Factors that can provoke the unintended effects in genetically engineered plants, their consequences and possibility of the avoiding of unintended effects with use of current methods of genetic modification are discussed. Modern methodological approaches applied to analyse the unintended effects during the safety assessment of transgenic plants, in particular methods of molecular profiling with different «-omic»-technologies are described.

Keywords: unintended (unexpected, untargeted) effects of genetic modification of plants, safety assessment of transgenic plants, profiling methods