Past Discussions 2013

Dear Participants of the Laboratory Network,

Thank you very much once again for the efforts you took to contribute to this forum discussion. The aim of this discussion was to establish a baseline of laboratories’ current capabilities including accessibility to required laboratory materials and the feasibility of research and development projects.

Countries are active in establishing detection laboratories to detect and monitor LMOs in the context of their national regulatory framework. The postings indicated that the laboratories are working within national frameworks that differ in their requirements for labelling and threshold levels of tolerance to LMOs. This ranges from those that do not have any labelling or threshold requirements, those that are currently in the process of working towards establishing their labelling and threshold requirements to those who are working within well-defined and accepted regulations.  Participants that have thus far shared their experiences indicated that their countries have one or more functioning laboratories several of which that have either achieved ISO17025 accreditation or are taking active steps towards doing so.

Participants also shared some of the challenges that they face in their laboratories. The most common included lack of reference materials, lack of standardized and validated detection methodologies and the high costs of analysis. Furthermore with the advent of novel LMOs is the challenge of dedicating the resources needed for the research and development of methods to detect them as well as unauthorized GM events both in the context of environmental monitoring and the detection of commercialised LMOs.

We hope that you have found these discussions to be useful thus far. The discussions will reopen on the 16th June focusing on the more scientific and technical aspects of LMO detection, taking into account some of the topics that were brought up during the course of this discussion which were of particular interest to participants.

Best regards,
The Secretariat