Many crops have closely related weeds with which they can hybridize. Some which are actually feral forms of the crops or weedy forms of crop progenitors. In many cases it would be detrimental to have crop genes transfer from the crop to the weed. For example, the major weed in direct seeded (non-transplanted) rice in the world is feral/weedy/"red" rice, and the only way to effectively deal with it would be with transgenic herbicide resistant rice, but the transgenes would quickly spread to the feral rice. We conceived developed methods of transgene mitigation where the transgene of choice is flanked in tandem with genes that would be useful for the crop but deleterious to feral forms. We validated the technology through the screen-house stage, and collaborators in the US and Cost-Rica are testing them at the field level.
