[Thanks to Joe Cummins for the message below. A reminder that we are now in the last week of this FAO e-mail conference on "GMOs in the pipeline: Looking to the next five years in the crop, forestry, livestock, aquaculture and agro-industry sectors in developing countries" and that the last day for receiving messages is Sunday 2 December 2012. The final messages will be posted on Monday 3 December and the conference is then closed. I also remind you that all of the messages posted in the conference are available at the searchable website https://listserv.fao.org/cgi-bin/wa?A0=Biotech-Room2-L. To see the messages from November sorted by date (latest on top), see https://listserv.fao.org/cgi-bin/wa?A1=ind1211&L=Biotech-Room2-L&O=D&H=0&D=1&T=1 ...Moderator]. 

I am Prof. Joe Cummins Professor Emeritus of Genetics, University of Western Ontario, Canada and Fellow of the Institute of Science in Society, London UK. 

Commenting on Jim Murray's Message 61. The term most frequently used to deal with gene transfers between sexually compatible plants and animals is cisgenic rather than transgenic. It has been demanded that the cisgenic plants or animals should not be regulated. However, there are both genetic and epigenetic considerations that make regulation of cisgenic organisms desirable. However, the main concern is that synthetic manipulations of both promoters and terminators or even the primary gene that may be palmed off as being cisgenic to avoid the cost of the regulatory hurdles.

Turning to the Aquabounty salmon, my understanding is that the fertilized eggs of the transgenic salmon will be produced in Prince Edward Island (PEI) Canada then transported to Panama for growth of the embryos. There has not been reported monitoring of the PEI facility to ensure that the fertilized eggs were safely contained and have not resulted in feral populations of the transgenic salmon. By the way, triploid salmon are known to revert to fertile animals at low but significant frequency.

Turning to the introduction of Atlantic salmon in the Pacific, Atlantic Salmon are farmed extensively in British Columbia where Infectious Salmon Anaemia Virus was introduced from the Atlantic Salmon into wild Pacific salmon stocks threatening the very survival of the Pacific stocks which lack resistance to the virus. Feral wild Atlantic salmon have been found in British Columbia presumably having escaped from the fish farms. Nearly a century ago efforts were made to establish wild Atlantic salmon stocks on the west coast and such efforts failed but the huge number of Atlantic Salmon escaping from pens may produce conditions driving the formation of stable wild populations. Who knows what the fast growing big feeding transgenic salmon will do to wild populations? In nature Atlantic Salmon (Salmo salar) sexually forms hybrids with brown trout while Chinook Salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) forms hybrids with pink salmon and perhaps steel head and rainbow trout. Natural hybrids of Atlantic and Chinook salmon have not been reported and are unlikely in nature but may be produced in the laboratory. Therefore the fast growing salmon is transgenic. However, the proponents of cisgenics in crop plants sometimes like to push the idea that gene transfers within a family (rather than genera or species) should be called cisgenic. I hope that the regulators worldwide will stick to limiting the term cisgenes to plants or animals with natural hybrids rather than artificial laboratory produced hybrids. 

Joe Cummins,
Professor Emeritus of Genetics  
Department of Biology,
University of Western Ontario
Canada
e-mail: jcummins (at) uwo.ca

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