familiarity

- having enough information to be able to judge the safety or risks of an LMO. It can be used to indicate ways of handling risks. It is not synonymous with safety. Relatively low degree of familiarity may be compensated for by appropriate management practices. Familiarity can be increased as a result of a trial or experiment. This increased familiarity can then form a basis for future risk assessment. [BSWG/2/5: Panel of Experts on Biosafety, Cairo 1995] - knowledge and experience with an organism, the intended application and the potential receiving environment. [BSWG/2/5: UNEP International Technical Guidelines for Safety in Biotechnology] - familiarity comes from the knowledge and experience available for conducting a risk/safety analysis prior to scale-up of any new plant line or crop cultivar in a particular environment. Familiarity takes into account of but need not be restricted to knowledge and experience with: the crop plant, including its flowering/reproductive characteristics, ecological requirements, and past breeding experiences; the agricultural and surrounding environment of the trial site; specific trait(s) transferred to plant line(s); results from previous basic research including greenhouse/glasshouse and small-scale field research with the new plant line or with other plant lines having the same trait; the scale-up of lines of the crop plant developed by more traditional techniques of plant breeding; the scale-up of other plant lines developed by the same technique; the presence of related (and sexually compatible) plants in the surrounding natural environment, and knowledge of the potential for gene transfer between the crop