Abstract
Many environmental applications of biotechnology involve deliberate release of organisms into the environment, where they must survive and multiply to perform their functions. Examples of such applications include degradation of toxic chemicals and in-situ leaching of ores. It is natural, when developing a scheme for assessing environmental risks of these microorganisms, to take as a point of departure existing schemes for assessing environmental risks of toxic contaminants. The components of such risk assessments, characterized by the National Academy of Sciences [1] as “hazard identification,” “dose-response assessment,” “exposure assessment,” and “risk characterization”, derive from a systematic examination of the physical, chemical, and toxicological phenomena underlying the risk: the emission rate of the toxicant, its dispersion in air and water, the chemical transformations occurring during transport, and the relationship between the dose to the exposed organism (usually man) and the toxicological effect.
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Barnthouse, L.W., Sayler, G.S., Suter, G.W. (1988). A Biological Approach to Assessing Environmental Risks of Engineered Microorganisms. In: Fiksel, J., Covello, V.T. (eds) Safety Assurance for Environmental Introductions of Genetically-Engineered Organisms. NATO ASI Series, vol 18. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-73169-3_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-73169-3_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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