Genetically Modified Crop on the Loose and Evolving in U.S. Midwest
Outside a grocery store in Langdon, N.D., two ecologists spotted a yellow canola plant growing on the margins of a parking lot this summer. They plucked it, ground it up and, using a chemical stick similar to those in home pregnancy kits, identified proteins that were made by artificially introduced genes. The plant was GM—genetically modified.
That’s not too surprising, given that North Dakota grows tens of thousands of hectares of conventional and genetically modified canola—a weedy plant, known scientifically as Brassica napus var oleifera, bred by Canadians to yield vegetable oil from its thousands of tiny seeds. What was more surprising was that nearly everywhere the two ecologists and their colleagues stopped during a trip across the state, they found GM canola growing in the wild. […]
That likely means that transgenic canola plants are cross-pollinating in the wild—and swapping introduced genes. Although GM canola in the wild has been identified everywhere from Canada to Japan in previous research, this marks the first time such plants have been shown to be evolving in this way. […]
Evolution at work… on human engineered plants!
This is both fascinating (and the zillionth example of the reality of evolution, for those willing to look at them) and scary. Human-engineered plants are quite ancient - most of the food we grow is from human-selection over millennia. Yet now, with the ability to transfer genes from just about any species into a target we are really starting to modify nature.
To where will it lead?