Biosafety training goes online

By Duncan Mboyah

Scientists have developed a biosafety tool to help developing countries assess genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

Researchers from the Centre for Biosafety of the Third World Network and New Zealand’s Centre for Integrated Research in Biosafety developed the kit to help the countries to responsibly evaluate the risks associated with GMOs.

The tool known as BAT is a free online resource that assists regulators and researchers to review scientific data provided by GMO developers in support of their safety evaluation.

"It has a feedback provision enabling it to evolve and improve," says the team leader, Prof Jack Heinemann of the University of Canterbury, New Zealand.

The tool was developed over the past five years as part of a larger Norwegian biosafety capacity building commitment.

Researchers from New Zealand, Norway, Solomon Islands, Malaysia, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, France and Germany took part in the project which was reviewed by top scientists and regulators from around the world.

At the advanced development phase it was used to support the training of regulators, civil society leaders, policy makers, journalists and researchers who took part in an international biosafety course held in Troms, Norway.

The managing director of the Kenya Plant Health Inspectorate Service (Kephis), Dr Chagema Kedera, says the tool will add to available testing mechanisms.

Besides having trained personnel on the identification and monitoring of biosafety work, he explains, the Kephis authority has a laboratory equipped with modern testing facilities, including a piece of kit that gives accurate and timely results.

"We are building a database of possible transformations and standardising testing procedures," he says.

He says Kephis took steps long before the Biosafety Act was enacted by designing open quarantine facilities and putting up a molecular laboratory with the capacity to test within trial facilities the gene flow of unapproved transformations and monitors.

BAT is organised in chapters ranging from explanations of molecular methods to genome analysis through and tests for human health and environmental effects.

— AWC Feature