Agricultural practices create opportunities for crop DNA to invade wild plant gene pools. This allelic introgression concerns conservationists because the resulting changes in genetic diversity can reduce a population's ability to withstand changes like climatic shifts, disease, or pest outbreaks. In a new study, researchers found substantial flaws in traditional methods used to track crop-wild gene flow, and developed a new, more sensitive approach to test agricultural systems for risk assessment of transgene escape.

Source: New methods to study 'genetic invasion' detect the escape of crop genomes into the wild