Environmental biosafety research in China with a special emphasis on rice (Poaceae: Oryza).

Many genetically modified (GM) crops have been developed in China and some of these are released for commercial production or environmental testing.This has generated great biosafety concerns and encouraged remarkable research activities. The environmental biosafety research mostly includes areas, such as gene flow and its ecological consequences, impact of transgenes on non-target organisms, development of resistance to the Bt toxin, fitness of interspecific hybrids, and field performance of GM crops. GM cotton, rice, soybean, wheat, and Brassica species were the main crops involved in environmental biosafety research. China pays a special attention on biosafety research of GM rice and its wild relatives, because of the desire for commercialization of GM rice. For environmental biosafety research in China, a few areas receive the most attention; these are pollen flow, crop-to-crop and crop-towild gene flow, non-target effect, fitness performance, and cost-benefit of GM rice in field performance. This paper presents these research activities in details.