Introduction to New Breeding Techniques

The legislation on genetically modified organism in Europe has been developed in the late 80s of the last century and came into place in 1990. Since then a number of new breeding techniques have evolved for which it is from a legal point of view not clear if all or some of them are under the scope of this legislation. As these techniques are quite different, covering very specific ones like new grafting techniques or precise Genome Editing using various nucleases for the induction of point mutations and also very broad ones like Synthetic Biology, it is virtually impossible to treat them all the same. Furthermore, different countries worldwide possess different regulation structures, leading to an unbalanced treatment of several new breeding techniques. To set up the theme of this workshop on regulation of the new breeding techniques, I will give a short introduction to the discussed techniques with an emphasis on plants.