| General |
| Several Websites offer useful entry-points to a diversity of biosafety data. These "one-stop shops" contain huge collections or listings of relevant informatic tools and links to other sites, and can provide and exhaustive and comprehensive array of biosafety-related information. |
 |
The central portal of the Biosafety Clearing House (BCH), hosted by the CBD Secretariat, Montreal, Canada, is a major repository of biosafety information. The BCH claims to be “an information exchange mechanism established by the CPB to assist Parties to implement its provisions and to facilitate sharing of information on, and experience with, LMOs”. The portal is available in all official UN languages, and to date, a number of relevant national, regional and international databases are interoperable with the CBD-BCH, thus facilitating the searching over 8000 records from these combined databases through a unified search mechanism. Information is searchable under the following themes: biosafety information resources, national contacts, laws and regulations, decision and declaration information (including risk assessment documents), capacity-building initiatives and a roster of experts. On the same webpage it is also possible to conduct a simple search on the text of the pages of the Biosafety Clearing-House web site, or to choose a category of linked websites to search. The CBD-BCH also contains a sub-database of “National Biosafety Websites and Databases”. |
 |
The FAO, in association with the organizations responsible for international standard setting in sanitary and phytosanitary matters, has developed the International Portal on Food Safety, Animal and Plant Health to provide a single access point for authorised official international and national information across the sectors of food safety, animal and plant health. Information can be browsed in a number of ways, including by cross-sectoral themes such as “Biotechnology/GMOs” for which there are records of various legislation/regulations, agreements, decisions, guidelines, manual/training materials, and reports from around the world. Each record is classified by commodity, geography, information type and source. |
 |
The ICGEB webpages provides information on biosafety and risk assessment for the environmental release of GMOs with special regards to the need of the developing world. Notable resources include: a Biosafety Bibliographic database, the Risk Assessment Search Mechanism (RASM), and the BiosafeRes database of past and current projects in GMO biosafety research, as well as the Collection of Biosafety Reviews and links to Internet biosafety resources offered by other organizations on its biosafety library webpages. |
 |
The OECD created the BioTrack Online website to provide information on environmental, food and feed safety issues relating to modern biotechnology. The home page focuses on the regulatory oversight of modern biotechnology products in OECD member countries, which includes information related to major legislative developments, documents, links to other related web sites, and online databases of modern biotechnology products, as well as field trials. The information includes regulatory contacts, product database, field trials, and free documents.
|
 |
Amongst the numerous activities of the Biotechnology and GMOs Unit of the EU’s JRC, Ispra, Italy, is the reception of all summary notifications of deliberate field trial releases (SNIFs) and the weekly updating of the SNIF database. The database is the repository of all notifications, and related RA reports when available, from across the EU after 17 October 2002 when the new Council Directive 2001/18/EC came into force. All notifications carried out under the previous Council Directive 90/220/EEC, that is, from 21 October 1991, can be found at http://biotech.jrc.it/deliberate/gmo.asp. The website also hosts the GMO Methods database which has been designed to allow access to information regarding methods of GMO analysis, and is organized into three sections; 1) General information on the GMO and the corresponding method (matrix, producer company, plant species, etc), 2) When available, specific information on the proficiency of the method and its validation status (specificity, sensitivity, LOD, linearity, working range, etc), and 3) Essential technical information regarding the method (primer sequences, amplicon length, apparatus, control primer sequences, use of certified reference materials, method of amplicon verification, etc). The JRC also provides a list of European member states national websites. |
 |
Amongst the many services provided on the Information Systems for Biotechnology (ISB) webpage is the Annotated Database of WWW Sites Pertaining to Agricultural / Environmental Biotechnology. Some of the 86 listed sites are true databases aimed at storing data, documents and other information, with a retrieval system that allows easy and efficient access to stored data, while others simply contain general information. The ISB site also offers a searchable Environmental Releases Database of information on applications for US field tests of genetically modified organisms maintained by the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) of the USDA. Additionally, the ISB site provides a series of links to international field trial sources. |
|
|
|