[Novel food sources: from GMO to the broadening of Russia's bioresource base]

Abstract

The modern strategy of humanity food providing is aimed at finding the exit from the food crisis in the shortest possible time, by the end of XXI century food and feed production should increase by at least 70%. These tasks solution implies not only the use of science-oriented technologies, but also the expansion of the food base by means of novel food sources, which don't have a history of safe use. In the Russian Federation the formation of novel food's safety assessment approaches is regulated at the state level and is the most important requirement for the possibility of usage. Russian experience of the second half of the XX century in the area of novel food sources' biomedical research unites two stages. The first of them dates back to the middle of the 1960s', when the Soviet scientists, in particular, the workforce of the Institute of Nutrition of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences, under the leadership of Academician A.A. Pokrovskii, have developed the evaluation approaches of the biological value and safety of microbial synthesized protein. The second stage of the safety assessment research development was the work with the genetically modified organisms of plant origin (GMO), that begun in the middle of the 1990s'. Since the moment of formation in 1995-1996, 9 methodical guidelines that regulate methods of safety assessment and control over GMO have been developed. Comprehensively formed by 2020, safety assessment system has been used in the framework of 27 GMO lines state registration that passed a whole cycle of medical and biological research and were allowed for use in nutrition of the population of the Eurasian Economic Union. Within the framework of these research a considerable amount of factual material has been accumulated, a regulatory and methodological basis has been built, and a substantial background for further fundamental and applied scientific research in the field of development and safety assessment of novel food has been created.

Keywords: approaches to the safety assessment of novel food; edible insects; genetically modified organisms; non-traditional sources of food raw materials; novel food.