Micropropagation, genetic engineering, and molecular biology of Populus

Agricultural science has established a framework for biological impact assessment through past work. Various risk assessments for diverse areas of agriculture, resulted in an accumulation of considerable information. Baseline information for biological impact assessment dates from the last century (Fulkerson 1987). One type of biological impact assessment is the environmental impact assessment on the release of transgenic poplar. Plant pathologists played a major role in an early experimental release of transgenic poplar (McNabb et al. 1991). Plant pathology has provided much of the information for developing biological impact assessment (Teng and Yang 1993) with a focus on complex microbe-related risk assessments. This paper discusses biological risk assessment for woody plants compared to herbaceous crops, specifically: 1) the need for and status of risk assessment; 2) risk assessment concepts; and 3) risk assessment methodology.