Roads not taken: The mismatch between safety and regulation of plant breeding innovation.

Regulatory frameworks for crop genetic modification remain method-focused despite transgenesis, cisgenesis, and genome editing enabling product-level risks comparable to conventional breeding, constraining key innovations.

• Why it matters: Food security and lower environmental impact depend on ongoing crop improvement, but current rules may not match the actual risk profile of newer breeding techniques.
• What they did: The work reviews recent examples—immune receptor transfer, cisgenesis-based disease resistance stacking, photosynthesis engineering, and AI-guided protein design—to show how regulation can limit adoption.
• The result: It argues for a science-based, proportionate, product-focused regulatory shift so improved crops are assessed by their properties rather than the method used.

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