Opinion: Advancing science in support of sustainable bio-innovation: 16th ISBR Symposium – in memory of Professor Alan Raybould

Just months before the 16 th Symposium of the International Society for Biosafety Research (ISBR) took place in St. Louis, MO (May 2023), the ISBR community suffered a shattering loss with the death of our dear friend and colleague Alan Raybould. Among Alan's innumerable contributions to the field of risk assessment and biosafety, he was an active contributor to ISBR over the course of his career, serving on the Board of Directors and as a member of the program committee, member and chair of the publication committee, contributing to symposium planning, chairing sessions and, as he was always known to do, delivering many notable and thought-provoking presentations at the symposia. The loss of Alan has left a hole in our community that simply cannot be filled. During the 16 th ISBR Symposium, Professor Alan Gray, former President of ISBR, who was an advisor, colleague, and longtime close friend of Alan, shared a tribute. We honour the memory of Alan Raybould by sharing that tribute as part of this Research Topic produced after the Symposium.As presented by Professor Alan Gray at the 16 th International Symposium on Biosafety Research, St. Louis, Missouri, May 3 2023 " First I would like to thank the Board of the ISBR for inviting me to pay this tribute to Alan -I am deeply honoured to do so. I will begin by recounting my personal experiences of Alan's life and work and will then review his contribution as a scientist and scholar. Finally, I will attempt to capture something of Alan's character and personality.I first met Alan in 1985 when my friend Mike Lawrence of the University of Birmingham's Department of Genetics suggested that we share a PhD student to tackle a project on the topic of population genetics. He came to us with, to quote his professor, "the best first in Manchester in a decade". He worked on the evolutionary origins of the grass Spartina anglica, doing the lab work in Birmingham (in the dear old days of isoenzyme electrophoresis) and the field work from Furzebrook (then a research station of The Institute of Terrestrial Ecology). I had moved to Furzebrook, which is in Dorset in southern England, a few years before and had begun to collect some type material of this famous allopolyploid invasive species, the site of its origin being nearby in Southampton harbour; but other commitments had prevented me from working on it. A copy of Alan's simply brilliant thesis exploring genetic variation in the putative parental species, the F1 hybrid and the allopolyploid has pride of place on my bookshelves.After a brief post-Doc in Birmingham Alan came to work in my group at ITE Furzebrook in 1990 and thus began more than three decades of exciting collaboration and wonderful friendship. We were researching genetic variation in natural populations of plants in relation to factors such as population size and isolation, breeding systems, life history traits and gene flow -mainly from a conservation genetics perspective. So when the GM crops debate took off we were well positioned to make a contribution to understanding the potential impacts of gene flow between GM crops and their wild relatives. In fact, one of our early papers in which we combined Alan's knowledge of genetic modification and my knowledge of the ecology of wild plants to look at the implications of hybridisation between modified crops and their UK relatives (Raybould and Gray 1993) remains his 42 second most cited publication. 43These were exciting times for our group. We expanded our work on gene flow population genetics to look at the wild relatives of some UK crops, most notably species of Brassica and Beta 45 (and also some grasses). Among other areas, we studied hybridisation rates and effects and the 46 prospects of ecological release by the transfer of ecologically relevant, fitness, traits to wild 47 populations. models for this included virus resistance in wild Brassica oleracea and Brassica rapa 48 and the role of the bolting gene in Beta maritima.