Plants manufacture essential aromatic amino acids such as phenylalanine through the shikimic acid pathway, housed in their chloroplasts. A transit peptide lets the cytoplasmically made protein enter chloroplasts. The results don't apply to other tolerant crops such as canola, corn, and cotton, which were obtained in separate transformation events, but Monsanto scientists are checking these varieties too. USDA deemed the crop safe enough to deregulate it in 1996. That same year, the Environmental Protection Agency signed off on applying glyphosate in conjunction with tolerant soybeans, which paved the way for widespread commercial use of the plants.
Canadian regulators feel the same.
The scientific community will also judge Monsanto's findings. It has value for the development of product-specific detection methods. Monsanto claims it discovered the extra inserts while developing sensitive line identification methods in preparation for product labeling. The company is using those methods on its other crops too. But the situation is complicated because the vector used for transformation contained two copies of the gene.