DOI: 10.1111/1365-2664.13612

Abstract

1. Atlantic salmon in aquaculture act as reservoir hosts and vectors of parasites like salmon lice and this parasite is shown to harm wild salmonid populations.

2. In this study, n = 29,817 tagged Atlantic salmon were studied in four release trials. Half of the released fish were given prophylactic treatment against lice, the other half represented sham control fish. We used a nested design comparing years with low and high lice density and seasonal dynamics in infestation pressure. The re-leased Atlantic salmon thus experienced highly variable lice infestation pressures, which we linked to survival and growth in returning fish. The fish were released in a protected ‘National Salmon Fjord’ and n = 559 Atlantic salmon were recaptured after spending 1–4 years at sea.

3. In most experimental groups 1%–2.5% of the fish were recaptured at return. However, survival of unprotected fish was extremely low for the trial released at the highest density of lice: only 0.03% of these Atlantic salmon returned to the river, compared to 1.86% in the protected group.

4. Synthesis and applications. We document that high lice density can cause more than 50 times higher mortality risk in Atlantic salmon on their sea migration, even in a fjord with protected status. Fine-tuned and hard-to-predict year-to-year dif-ferences in timing, both for the wild smolt migration and the population build-up of lice released from aquaculture, means life or death to wild salmon. Management actions such as spatial segregation of farmed fish and lice (e.g. closed farm pens), and/or moving farms away from vulnerable habitats for wild salmonids (fjords and coastal areas), may be needed to ensure sustainable coexistence of wild and farmed Atlantic salmon.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
© 2020 The Authors. Journal of Applied Ecology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Ecological Society

Thursdays 17 and 24 September and 1 October 2020

16:00 – 17:30 Central European Summer Time

European regulatory systems are often portrayed as some of the best in the world in terms of stringency and precaution for protecting public and environmental health. The laissez-faire deregulatory approach of the USA is often portrayed as standing at the opposite end from the EU on a spectrum of regulatory rigour. We recently published a paper[1] critiquing how European legislation on the regulation of agricultural GMOs (genetically modified organisms) is framed and how the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) – with the blessings, indeed influence of the EU Commission – assesses the risks of agricultural GMOs. In this paper, we highlighted how EFSA’s risk assessors assume a simplistic reductionist model of the ways in which harm might arise. In the end, strikingly, the practical outcome of their risk assessment and the required documentation for GM foods is similar to that of the US deregulatory system. How is that possible?

Moreover, this reductionistic approach to assessing risks and the corresponding reductionistic interpretation of European law, is not limited to GMOs but forms the foundation of many different regulatory regimes, such as those for pesticides, food ingredients, food additives, the environmental release of chemicals and even pharmaceutical products. Reductionism is treated as if it is authoritative because it can provide apparently precise answers by using standardized protocols. However, this precision is achieved at the cost of failing realistically and fully to assess the risks that arise, beyond the walls of the laboratories, in the complexities of actual practices in the real world. Assessing individual compounds in isolation may facilitate international regulatory harmonization, which can help to overcome non-tariff barriers to trade, but it fails to ensure the protection of public and/or environmental health.

With this set of webinars, we wish to deepen and extend the analysis in our recent paper on reductionism in EFSA’s assessments of the risks of GMOs, to show how similar approaches have been applied to other fields of regulatory appraisal, and how, time and again, they also fail to protect us from harm. We will conclude by explaining what can and should be done to overcome these failings, and thereby also help to make EFSA’s science meet its EU legislated objectives.

To do so, we will hold a set of webinars that will highlight EFSA’s inadequately narrowly framed assessments of the risks from GMOs, pesticides and food additives, and provide an explanation of: why EFSA has chosen to take what are unnecessarily reductionist scientific approaches; what a more comprehensive and acceptable framing might look like (including what complementary policy measures from EFSA’s policy client the EC, might be required; how this could be implemented; and what consequences could be anticipated).

The series of webinars is held for an audience with an interest in regulation, risk assessment and the science/policy interface from all sectors. The speakers have contributed in various forms to all these aspects over the course of their careers. No foreknowledge is expected of participants.

The webinars are held in English on zoom. They will be moderated by Diederick Sprangers, scientific coordinator of ENSSER.

Participants are invited to either enter into discussion with the speakers or submit written questions during the webinar. The webinars will be live streamed and recorded and the recordings will be put online on ENSSER’s website and on ENSSER’s youtube channel. Participants entering the oral discussion will be requested to state their name and affiliation. By registering for a webinar, participants give their permission to publish and livestream their recorded oral remarks and their video image online.

Written questions will only be answered when the questioner adds his/her name to the question (which will happen automatically if they provide their name upon entering the zoom webinar). However, the name will not be read aloud when the question is dealt with, to avoid having to gain permission from the questioner for publishing the name and the question.

In addition to zoom, the webinars will also be broadcast by livestream on youtube. Written questions may also be entered in the livestream (on the same condition that the name of the questioner is added), but oral participation in the discussion can only take place via zoom.

Programme:

Thursday 17 September 2020, 16:00 – 17:30

Science in policy-making to protect public and environmental health

Speakers:

Prof. Erik Millstone, Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex, UK

Prof (em.) Brian Wynne, Lancaster University, UK

Third speaker t.b.a.

Registration: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_8nysRlQ_QmqVtlMAUFY3JA

The webinar will begin with a chronological and critical review of the main ways in which the role of science in public policy-making has been understood. A crucial problem with many of those interpretations has been that too often they have assumed that scientists can routinely provide robust and definitive grounds for settling policy questions. Another has been the assumption that scientists all ‘speak with one voice’, when in practice the facts are often uncertain, knowledge is incomplete and there is rarely a consensus within the scientific community on key policy-related issues.

The discussion will be illustrated with examples of how the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) interprets its mandate to provide the European Commission, the Parliament and the Member States with scientific advice on food safety and environmental protection. That discussion should provide an introduction to, and a framework for analysing several case studies, namely: agricultural GMOs, agricultural pesticides and food additives.

The main structural features of the legislative and regulatory regimes covering those domains will be outlined, highlighting the roles that EFSA and the Commission are expected to play; it will focus on the supposed division of labour between science and policy-making.

The remainder of this webinar will focus on the activities and practices of EFSA and the European Commission and Member States in relation to pesticides and food additives. Those case studies show that EFSA’s panels have been framing their risk assessments with very narrow sets of assumptions about how adverse consequences could occur. Consequently we will show that EFSA’s assessments are typically incomplete and incompatible with the EU legislative and policy goals, such as providing high levels of protection and taking a precautionary approach.

Thursday 24 September 2020, 16:00 – 17:30

GMO regulations and their interpretation: how current risk assessments of GMOs are bound to fail

Speaker:

Dr. Angelika Hilbeck, ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Registration: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_3L7S1aC3QTaO8sg8Bk0qVA

Firstly, we compare the contrasting regulatory approaches of the US and the EU and explain their different underlaying scientific premises. While the legislative texts of the EU set appropriate objectives, their concrete implementation has fallen far short of the legislative goals. EFSA’s prevailing approach to GM crop and food risk assessment starts from what it terms a ‘comparative safety assessment’ (called ‘substantial equivalence’ in other regulatory regimes) which is based on rudimentary data sets of molecular, chemical and phenotypic data from GM plants and any non-GM varieties. Those data are inadequate (and designed) for predicting adverse biological, toxicological and ecological effects. However, when GM products are deemed to have passed a ‘comparative safety assessment’ prior to the risk assessment step, EFSA has interpreted that as grounds for conducting only very narrowly circumscribed risk assessments (if at all), which do not require meaningful data from studies of ecological or eco-toxicological impacts. This allows in the end that, despite the contrasting regulatory premises and goals, under both regulatory regimes of the US and the EU, similar dossiers seeking approval or deregulated status (as it is called in the US) can be filed – much to the convenience of the industry but not in the public interest. How this may play out if the current push for taking newly genetically engineered organisms (using so-called ‘gene editing’ tools) out of regulations succeeds and what the consequences of the ‘no transgene – no risk’ mantra will spell for human and environmental health will also be presented and discussed.

Thursday 1 October 2020, 16:00 – 17:30

Towards better EU science which also helps meet democratic legislative objectives for protecting environmental and public health

Speaker:

Prof (em.) Brian Wynne, Lancaster University, UK

Registration: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Y1xtqqZzQPqR6R95taXUxw

We have focused previous sessions and topics on the undue scientific reductionism which undermines risk assessment (RA) in regulatory decision-making in the EU, and in particular misses possible harms from the many kinds of products supposed to be regulated so as to ensure high EU standards of public health and environmental protection.

Many of these reductionist scientific choices by EFSA and related regulatory scientists are from within the science. What is never recognised by those institutional authorities, claiming to uphold the best scientific standards, is that these are choices, with other scientific options available. They are not, as often claimed or assumed, ‘the only (good science) option’. Policy bodies like the European Commission (EC) which both funds EFSA’s work and uses its “independent science”, already influence that science with normative policy choices, such as burden of proof, framing questions (and thus also, questions excluded). Reductionism in scientific options may provide precision. Precision can be desirable, and sometimes necessary as priority scientific goal; but it is not the only goal. Realism and scope are two other important science goals, which often conflict with precision, and need to be negotiated in different situations in which science is used. Science for environmental and public health goals, such as EFSA science, should prioritise realism, and as comprehensive as feasible, because EU legislation stipulates that cumulative, indirect, long-term, and interactive multifactorial harms should be included within the scope of EFSA’s risk assessments. Existing EFSA science shows itself to have failed to address those legislative requirements.

In this final session led by Brian Wynne, we will review not only the scientific alternative options for avoiding the harms from the prevailing culture of reductionism which has damaged EFSA’s science and undermined public trust in the EU’s processes, decisions and institutions. We will amplify this part of the overall picture with an account of what further changes will be required to improve EFSA’s risk assessments and its culture, and thereby enhance it contributions to the EU legislative aims, and especially the EU’s explicit policy commitment to implementing the Precautionary Principle (PP). We will also show the falsehood of the EC’s claim that the PP is only relevant to post-RA risk management, but not to RAs. Despite claims to the contrary, science is not intrinsically precautionary; science-based risk assessments can be more or less precautionary, depending on their framings. Risk assessments have prior policy choices inherent in their framings, and those are known as ‘risk assessment policies’ (or RAPs). The EU (and all its member states) have signed up to making their risk assessment policies explicit in the UN FAO/WHO Codex Alimentarius Commission’s 2007 policy declaration, but those commitments are not being honoured. Legitimate and publicly trusted EFSA science would also require these currently covert EC policy choices to be made explicit, and taken by properly accountable processes by risk managers rather than risk assessors. Proper implementation of those commitments would help EFSA’s science to become more open, comprehensive, precautionary and trustworthy.

[1]    Angelika Hilbeck, Hartmut Meyer, Brian Wynne and Erik Millstone: “GMO regulations and their interpretation: how EFSA’s guidance on risk assessments of GMOs is bound to fail”, Environ Sci Eur (2020) 32:54, https://doi.org/10.1186/s12302-020-00325-6

Environmental Sciences Europe volume 32, Article number: 106 (2020)

Abstract

Genome editing techniques, especially the CRISPR/Cas technology, increase the possibilities and the speed of altering genetic material in organisms. So-called genome editing is increasingly being used to achieve agriculturally relevant novel traits and/or genetic combinations in both plants and animals, although predominantly as proof of concept studies, with commercial growing or rearing so far limited to the U.S. and Canada. However, there are numerous reports of unintended effects such as off-target effects, unintended on-target effects and other unintended consequences arising from genome editing, summarised under the term genomic irregularities. Despite this, the searching for genomic irregularities is far from routine in these studies and protocols vary widely, particularly for off-target effects, leading to differences in the efficacy of detection of off-target effects. Here, we describe the range of specific unintended effects associated with genome editing. We examine the considerable possibilities to change the genome of plants and animals with SDN-1 and SDN-2 genome editing (i.e. without the insertion of genes conferring the novel trait) and show that genome editing techniques are able to produce a broad spectrum of novel traits that, thus far, were not possible to be obtained using conventional breeding techniques. We consider that the current EU risk assessment guidance for GMOs requires revision and broadening to capture all potential genomic irregularities arising from genome editing and suggest additional tools to assist the risk assessment of genome-edited plants and animals for the environment and food/animal feed in the EU.

Continue reading

A Proposed Origin for SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 Pandemic

The interview was published on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WQp2Aqr1ps

The Q&A parts with Michael are in English and I’ve noted their times:

2’45”-5’40”

6’50”-8’35”

9’35”-13’40”

14’10”-14’47”

The reflections on the nature of time in Relativity Theory will be hinted in reference to the new bridges recently proposed by Connes and by Rovelli’s “perspectival” approach, two major steps towards a unification of quantum, thermodynamical and relativistic times. The so called “time of philosophers”, a time of the cognizing ego, from Saint Augustin to Husserl and Bergson, is based on a different, but relevant perspective and it has been traditionally opposed to the “time of physicists”. In between these two approaches, we discuss a proper time of phylogeny and ontogeny, in biology, with their own rhythms and specific irreversibility. On the one side, biological time needs to be scientificallyobjectivised as an invariant of the knowing subject and thus move, as in physics, “from the subjective-absolute to the objective-relative” (Weyl’s approach, extended to time). On the other, we propose a “geometry” of life’s rhythms and an “extended present” that radically differ from the prevailing spatialization of physical time that Bergson soundly criticizes. The proper irreversibility and the central, “operatorial”, role of time in biology will be stressed, as nothing in biology can be understood except in the light of a temporal perspective, both evolutionary and organismal. In particular, today’s eco-systemic changes bring to the limelight some disruptions of the evolutionary fine-tuning of biological rhythms and physical clocks that may be better understood by highlighting their theoretical differences as well as their environmental interactions. « It is to the credit of Bergson’s philosophy to have pointed out forcefullythis deep division between the world of mathematical concepts and theimmediately experienced continuity of phenomenal time (“la durée”). »(H. Weyl, Das Kontinuum, 1918)

by G. Longo

Read the full article here: https://www.di.ens.fr/users/longo/files/TwinsVScloks.pdf

Genetic engineering endangers the protection of species

This report is primarily concerned with the consequences of genetic engineering interventions into evolutionary
processes. Leading scientists working in the field of ‘new’ genetic engineering are already talking about the ‘end
of the beginning’ (George Church, 2012): in future, new life forms will no longer evolve from natural processes
of self-reproduction and self-organisation, they will, instead, be designed by scientists. New genetic engineering
technologies, such as the CRISPR/Cas gene scissors, are set to play an important role in this development.

View the pdf-file of the article: https://www.testbiotech.org/sites/default/files/Genetic%20engineering%20endangers%20protection%20of%20species.pdf

The study “The myth of climate smart agriculture – why less bad isn’t good” discusses these topics. Has the impact of agriculture on climate change been accurately depicted so far? Methane burping cows are pilloried, but nitrous oxide emission from massive nitrogen inputs go almost unnoticed. Linking farm acreage to livestock numbers, soil fertility and pasture grazing – what role do such measures have to play in climate adapted agriculture? How big is the climate protection and adaptation potential of current digitalization and precision farming compared to that of ecological agricultural methods and organic agriculture?

By presenting facts and data, this study shows why the so-called modern intensive agricultural system is more climate damaging than climate smart. The authors show that corrections via Big Data, precision farming and increasing yields per hectare/animal unit cannot significantly change this.

In this study Dr Andrea Beste, Agricultural Scientist and Political Adviser and Dr Anita Idel, Veterinarian and Mediator, Lead Author of the UN IAASTD report on global agriculture (2008), also show, how arable and livestock farming can be made truly sustainable, climate friendly and climate proof: cattle shouldn’t be demonized instead their potential must be realised. Agricultural systems can become resilient and flexible with agroforestry and permaculture and thereby able to even out extreme weather events for longer.

View the full study here:

https://www.arc2020.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Myth-of-climate-smart-agriculture-final.pdf

Press release https://www.env-health.org/new-scientific-study-highlights-non-monotonic-dose-response-curves-and-low-dose-effects-of-bisphenol-a/

Accompanying Q&A https://www.env-health.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/QA-A-combined-morphometric-and-statistical-approach-to-assess-non-monotonicity-in-the-developing-mammary-gland-of-rats-in-the-CLARITY-BPA-study.pdf

Prof J Godfroid and Prof N de Sadeleer published an article (special issue on Covid in the European Journal of Risk Regulation) on the zoonotic origin of COVID-19 and, generally speaking, the impacts of viruses on wildlife, livestock and human health. This Open Access article aims at raising the awareness of the conservation of wild fauna and their habitats in order to reduce the transmission of pathogens (mainly viruses) to humans.

View the article here:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-journal-of-risk-regulation/article/story-behind-covid19-animal-diseases-at-the-crossroads-of-wildlife-livestock-and-human-health/04211FA5F6A2DAA66FF6C599B2FC4D37

Please find the abstract here: https://setac.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ieam.4278

Please find the article here: https://setac.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ieam.4278

The environment has all but disappeared from political discourse as the world grapples with a pandemic. COVID-19 is seems to be our “payback” for the excesses of globalisation.

Where international institutions, the United Nations, and the EU have failed, the COVID-19 Coronavirus has succeeded. Not so long ago and despite Greta Thunberg’s hopes, President Trump’s disdain was enough to prevent the environmental crisis from being the number one political priority. Now that the new Coronavirus is here to stay, it is also having an effect on the environment, making us pause to think more about green issues.

The European Environment Agency estimates that air pollution causes more than 430,000 premature deaths in Europe every year. By mapping air pollution based on satellite observations, a strong reduction in the concentration of nitrogen dioxide produced as a result of road traffic and other fossil fuel combustion processes can be seen in Northern Italy, coinciding with the lockdown causing less traffic and industrial activities.  The waters of the Grand Canal in Venice have not been this clear for years.  According to NASA, since the epidemic broke out, atmospheric pollution in China has fallen sharply, thus saving thousands of people from premature death. The slowdown in economic activity will result in a drastic fall in greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. Multitudes of political commitments and vast tomes of legislation have not been able to achieve the reductions we are now seeing.

A number of virological, epidemiological, and ethnographic arguments suggest that COVID-19 has a zoonotic origin. The pangolin, a species threatened with extinction due to poaching for both culinary purposes and traditional Chinese pharmacopeia, is now suspected of being the “missing link” in the transmission to humans of a virus that probably originated in a species of bat. Human predation of wild fauna and the reduction in habitats have thus ended up creating new interfaces that favour the transmission of pathogens, mainly viruses, to humans. Domesticated animals and wild fauna thus constitute a reservoir for almost 80% of emerging human diseases (SARS-Cov, MERS-CovV, Ebola). These diseases are all zoonotic in origin.

As if out of a Chinese fairy tale, the bat and the pangolin have taught us a lesson: within an increasingly interdependent world, environmental crises will become ever more intertwined with health crises. Questions relating to public health will no longer be confined to the secrecy of the physician’s consulting room or the sanitised environment of the hospital. They are now being played out in the arena of international trade, ports and airports, and distribution networks. Simply put, all human activity creates new interfaces that facilitate the transmission of pathogens from an animal reservoir to human. Environmental changes, such as the reduction in habitats for wild fauna and the intemperate trade in fauna, are the biggest causes for the emergence of new diseases.

With the explosion of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world appears to have changed abruptly. There is a distinct before and an after. Political responsibilities are having to be shouldered. Solidarity is rising up from the ashes. Businesses are adapting to the new constraints and suddenly discovering the virtues of a future circular economy. The financial sector is being forced to rethink its models. Will this unsettling strangeness end up plunging our contemporary societies into an unprecedented state of vulnerability? And could one say the same about climate change?

Some might think that these questions will fade into the background once the pandemic has been brought under control and we all return to business as usual. But it is this in particular that we have to fear. Numerous scientists and researchers are cooperating on a massive scale at universities and research institutes around the world. This health crisis must make us stop and think about how we deal with risks, how we assess them, and even how we talk about them. We need to move to a radically different social model for dealing with risk.

Over the centuries, pandemics have laid down markers between different eras of human society. We must not wait for this new health crisis to be resolved before thinking about a radically new society. We must define now a new integrative understanding of the multilevel biosocial pathways linking society, biology, health, and socio-economic attainment, for achieving the overarching objective of the UN Sustainable Development Goals: peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future.

Nicolas de Sadeleer is a professor of law and holds the Jean Monnet Chair at the University of Saint Louis in Brussels, Belgium.

Jacques Godfroid is a professor of microbiology at UiT – The Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø, Norway.

This article is published under a Creative Commons Licence and may be republished with attribution. The article was first published on:

Authors: Katharina Kawall, Juliana Miyazaki, Andreas Bauer-Panskus, Christoph Then

Overview of genome editing applications using SDN-1 and SDN-2 in regard to EU regulatory issues – New methods of genetic engineering (genome editing) and their potential impact on nature protection and the environment

By Andreas Bauer-Panskus, Katharina Kawall, Juliana Miyazaki, Christoph Then

AND:

Rendering of the sustainable pulse. 

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The report was commissioned by the Alliance 90/The Greens parliamentary group in the German Bundestag.

The Green party’s statement on the report. (German)

The comment by the Süddeutsche Zeitung. (German)

The idea to not only change but also eradicate species via genetic modification has existed for a long time. The technical means to do so have only just become available. With new genetic engineering techniques, in particular the “molecular scissors” provided by CRISPR/Cas9, it may soon become possible to pass a particular gene on to all descendants in the next generation.

The scientific breakthrough needed for a gene drive came in 2015 using the model organism Drosophila and the inheritance of eye colour. The scientists were so euphoric about their ability to ensure the spread of the chosen gene to future generations of flies that they called their technique a “Mutagenic Chain Reaction”. The ability to “produce” not only properties such as eye colour, but also female (or male) sterility, and to propagate these properties into whole populations or species, offers researchers the hope of using this technique to stop the spread of unwanted or problematic species or to eradicate them altogether.

View what scientists have to say about gene drive at the gene drive symposium in this 15 minutes documentary:

GMOs AND ROUNDUP: SIMILAR LONG TERM TOXICITIES DUE TO GLYPHOSATE FORMULATIONS
Glyphosate is associated with carcinogenic petroleum additives and heavy metals in pesticides (formulations, which are always mixtures). This penetrates and bioaccumulates in most edible agricultural GMOs, causing liver, kidney and hormonal damages, induces tumors. Here we explain in a new scientific publication why this has not been taken into account by heavily compromised experts and the practices evidenced in the Monsanto Papers.
https://rdcu.be/b1znx

OGMs ET ROUNDUP : TOXICITE A LONG TERME COMPARABLE, DUE AUX FORMULATIONS DE GLYPHOSATE
Le glyphosate est associé avec des additifs cancérogènes à base de pétrole et de métaux lourds dans les formulations de pesticides (des mélanges). Ceux-ci pénètrent et s’accumulent dans les OGM en agriculture, causant des dommages hépatiques, rénaux et hormonaux induisant des tumeurs. Ici nous expliquons dans une nouvelle publication scientifique pourquoi ceci n’a pas été considéré par des experts hautement compromis et des pratiques mises en évidence dans les Monsanto Papers.
https://rdcu.be/b1znx

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/870105v1.full.pdf

Abstract:

There is intense debate as to whether glyphosate can interfere with aromatic amino
acid biosynthesis in microorganisms inhabiting the gastrointestinal tract, which could
potentially lead to negative health outcomes. We have addressed this major gap in
glyphosate toxicology by using a multi-omics strategy combining shotgun
metagenomics and metabolomics. We tested whether glyphosate (0.5, 50, 175 mg/kg
bw/day), or its representative EU commercial herbicide formulation MON 52276 at the
same glyphosate equivalent doses, has an effect on the rat gut microbiome in a 90-
day subchronic toxicity test. Clinical biochemistry measurements in blood and
histopathological evaluations showed that MON 52276 but not glyphosate was
associated with statistically significant increase in hepatic steatosis and necrosis.
Similar lesions were also present in the liver of glyphosate-treated groups but not in
the control group. Caecum metabolomics revealed that glyphosate inhibits the enzyme
5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate (EPSP) synthase in the shikimate pathway as
evidenced by an accumulation of shikimic acid and 3-dehydroshikimic acid. Levels of
caecal microbiome dipeptides involved in the regulation of redox balance (γ-
glutamylglutamine, cysteinylglycine, valylglycine) had their levels significantly
increased. Shotgun metagenomics showed that glyphosate affected caecum microbial
community structure and increased levels of Eggerthella spp. and Homeothermacea
spp.. MON 52276, but not glyphosate, increased the relative abundance of Shinella
zoogleoides. Since Shinella spp. are known to degrade alkaloids, its increased
abundance may explain the decrease in solanidine levels measured with MON 52776
but not glyphosate. Other glyphosate formulations may have different effects since
Roundup® GT Plus inhibited bacterial growth in vitro at concentrations at which MON
52276 did not present any visible effect. Our study highlights the power of a multi-
omics approach to investigate effects of pesticides on the gut microbiome. This
revealed the first biomarker of glyphosate effects on rat gut microbiome. Although
more studies will be needed to ascertain if there are health implications arising from
glyphosate inhibition of the shikimate pathway in the gut microbiome, our findings can
be used in environmental epidemiological studies to understand if glyphosate can
have biological effects in human populations.

Published: Environmental Sciences Europe volume 31, Article number: 92 (2019)

DOI https://doi.org/10.1186/s12302-019-0274-1

Abstract

The introduction of herbicide-tolerant (HT) genetically engineered (GE) soybeans has raised new challenges for the European risk assessment of imported food and feed. Food and feed products derived from these plants may show specific patterns of chemical residues and altered nutritional composition. Furthermore, there has been a substantial increase in the usage of herbicides in soybean production due to the emergence of resistant weeds. This concerns particular glyphosate-based herbicides and also other herbicides. In this review, we give an overview of available data regarding glyphosate application on HT GE soybeans in North and South America. We have further compared this data with herbicide applications in experimental field trials conducted by the industry. We conclude that field trials carried out for risk assessment purposes do not generally represent the real agronomic conditions in commercial HT GE plant cultivation. In most cases, neither the applied dose nor the number of applications match real conditions. This finding is especially relevant for risk assessment since a review of relevant publications shows that the amount and timing of spraying glyphosate as a complementary herbicide onto HT GE plants can impact their composition; this is relevant to EFSA comparative risk assessment of GMOs. Further, closely related issues were identified that overlap with EU GMO and pesticide regulation, but are not currently considered. These issues concern indirect, cumulative and combinatorial effects as well as the assessment of mixed toxicity. Consequently, current risk assessment practice for HT GE plants cannot be considered to fulfil EU regulatory standards which require the safety of food and feed to be demonstrated. It is much more likely that concerns about the health risks of HT GE plant material used for food and feed have been underestimated. We therefore conclude that the EU risk assessment of food and feed derived from HT GE plants needs substantial improvement.

Please find the press release to the findings of the scientific article in the attachment below or on: https://www.testbiotech.org/en/press-release/new-scientific-publication-eu-risk-assessment-genetically-engineered-glyphosate

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cotox.2019.11.003