Escape of transgenes and its ecological risks
转基因的逃逸及生态风险

The rapid development of biotechnology, particularly the transgenic technology, has brought us with tremendous opportunities to solve the world's starvation problems that have been caused by the continued expanding of the global population. However, the application of transgenic biotechnology and the environmental release of transgenic organisms have evoked a series of extraordinary debates on biosafety issues related to the prosperity and the future of transgenic technology. The public and scientific communities are desperately interested in knowing whether the transgenic products would pose negative influences on plants and animals, human life and health, as well as on genetic resources and environment. These concerns have become universal hot topics over the last decade. Among the most debated biosafety issues caused potentially by transgenic products, transgene escape to the environment and its consequent ecological risks become one of the appealing focal points. In this review, a series of biosafety issues concerned by public, including the possibility of transgene escape and its various paths, as well as the potential ecological risks caused by such escape were discussed, and various approaches for controlling for transgene escape and the factors to consider when designing safety isolation distance between transgenic varieties and other concerned plants were also examined. The objective of this review is to allow readers to understand the potential biosafety problems caused by environmental release of transgenic crops and by the escape of foreign transgenes in particular, and to use the effective tools to control and avoid transgene escape.