Figure 1.

Plant breeding techniques categorized according to their history of use and criteria potentially defining their legal status. For each category of breeding techniques, criteria potentially defining their status are marked as colored bars (the sizes of which do not refer to their level of risk). Categories are arbitrarily positioned on the x-axis according to the typology and cumulation of fulfilled criteria. Each plant breeding technique is placed on the graph according to the category it belongs to, and to its history of use: black triangles and circles represent respectively techniques that are currently under the scope of Directive 2001/18/EC and exempted according to the present study, while white triangles represent techniques which could be exempted by means of a limited legislative proposal (see Table 1 and preceding sections). Legend of the x-axis: “New Combination”: creation of a genetic variation (sequence, location) that was not present initially in the genome (see Custers et al. (2019); “Beyond nature”: genetic “[a]teration beyond what does occur naturally by mating and/or natural recombination” (Custers et al., 2019); “[U]se” lato sensu of recNA: “use of recombinant nucleic acid molecules” (lato sensu), i.e., introduction in the plant of DNA or RNA sequences, but not insertion of heritable recombinant NA sequences into the genome (related to question “6)” from Table 1 ); “[U]se” stricto sensu of recNA: “use of recombinant nucleic acid molecules” (stricto sensu), i.e., stable insertion of heritable DNA sequences into the genome (related to question “6)” from Table 1 ).