Analysis of the characteristics of transgenic flax lines has shown that the risk for potential adverse effects on human and animal health and the receiving environment, resulting from the planned field trials with GM flax and linseed lines, is consistently negligible:
Cultivation of flax depends to a great deal on human care because its competetivness is very low. Current flax and linseed cultivars are not able to withstand winter under condition of mid Europe both on field areas and in natural environments either as seeds of plants. Under cold and wet conditions flax plants are immediately attacked by numerous fungal and bacterial pathogenes and crop has to be chemically protected against harm. Flax propagates using the seed exclusively.
The risk of the introduced traits in flax to be the cause of any competitive advantage or disadvantage in natural environments is also negligible. Like for any other conventional flax, the likelihood of these GM flax and linseed lines to spread into non-agronomic environments is negligible. Moreover, there is no potential for gene transfer from GM flax to any wild plant species. There is a limited number of wild flax species common in Europe, which are sexually compatible to cultivated flax but their natural habitats in CZ do not correspond to areas of flax cultivation. Even our attempts to obtain hybrids through artificial crossings with L. flavum were unsuccessful (Tejklová 2005).
GM flax lines pose negligible risk for adverse environmental effects through their interactions with target organisms. The ecological interactions of GM lines derived from insertion mutagenesis were not different from traditional flax. Based on target genes characteristics the same is expected for other modified lines.