When ‘outcrossing’ occurs, genes do not move between plants as individual entities. They move in ‘bundles’, so to speak, which is why conventional breeding is so difficult.

So for instance, a crop with the WUE trait would also have delayed/no dehiscence, that being the tendency to scatter seeds at maturity. Dehiscence is a valuable trait in a weed, because it’s an essential part of propagation. Dehiscence in a crop makes it a non-crop — at maturity, the seeds are scattered, making harvest well-nigh impossible.

There are other deleterious traits in crops that would outcross in the gene-bundle. The odds of natural selection preserving one particular transgene out of the entire background are staggering.

Anastasia: Never address your writing to the worry-worts. Why bother? That last section weakened your writing. The way it’s included after references and ‘thanks’ is particularly awkward.

Say Hi to Kendall for me and tell him to get a new earring.

Other crop traits such as dehiscence do not survive well in the wild. Generally speaking, a good crop makes for a lousy weed. A WUE trait would flow with other other traits that would doom it as a weed. Perhaps after many generations in the wild under natural evolutionary pressures the WUE trait would single itself out, but we’re talking a long time here.

One possibility is that a plant which has a transgene operating during vegetative growth which improves vegetative growth will have the same transgene operating during reproductive stages – increasing vegetative growth, which isn’t a good thing.

However, if I could explain (to any degree of certainty) the lack of correlation for transgenics which generally appears to be the case for non-transgenics, I’d be making a lot more money than I am right now.

Also on yield – I think (though don’t know) that dry matter accumulation generally correlates pretty well with yield, but this has always fallen apart in transgenics – although you only have to be wrong once to change the world.