The global area of GM Crops continued to grow in 2018 and reached 191.7 million hectares. Twenty-six countries approved biotech crops for planting and an additional 44 countries (18 + 26 EU countries) officially imported biotech crops for food, feed, and processing, meaning that biotech crops are now commonly accepted in those countries. First-generation GM seed is being commercialized by global agricultural companies in advanced countries such as the United States and parts of Europe. The fact that more than 90% of first-generation GM seeds, which have been commercialized for 20 years, are both insect resistant and herbicide resistant proves that they continue to have an effect on improving agricultural productivity and increasing farmers' incomes. As the effectiveness of GM crops has been proven and technology has been developed, the GM crop development trend has recently changed. In other words, it has moved from being producer-oriented to benefiting both farmers and consumers. In Korea, the National Program for GM Crops (NCGC), one of the Next-Generation BioGreen 21 Programs organized by Rural Development Administration (RDA), was established in 2011 to develop biotech crops that will be used in the future to solve our agricultural problems. To accomplish this mission, the NCGC carried out the exploration of useful functional genes, the development of qualified events, and the safety assessment of developed events. Here, we introduce the current status of GM crop development and commercialization in the world and in Korea.

Crops are exposed to various environmental stresses. These have been affecting the growth of crops, resulting in the severe loss of agronomic production in many countries. Therefore, development of new varieties of resistant crops is required to assure the desired productivity of crops in stress conditions. In this study, a putatively stress-related gene BrTSR53 was isolated from Brassica rapa. The BrTSR53 is 481 bp long and contains ORF region of 234 bp. This ORF showed strong sequence similarities to the uncharacterized genes from Arabidopsis. The expression of BrTSR53 was determined by quantitative real-time PCR analysis. After 3 hr, the highest quantities of mRNA were revealed in cold and salt stress treatments. In drought stress treatments, there was the highest expression after 36 hr. Therefore, it was confirmed that the ORF in BrTSR53 should be a gene that confer increased resistance to B. rapa growing in different stress conditions. The ORF region of BrTSR53 gene was cloned into an expression vector, pYES-DEST52, and a new protein with molecular weight of 13 kDa was detected by western blot analysis. Also, stress tolerance tests showed that BrTSR53-ORF transgenic yeast exhibited increased resistance to the salt stresses compared with the control. In conclusion, the present data predicts that novel ORF in BrTSR53 can serve as an important genetic resource for abiotic stress resistance.