Abstract
The potential social-economic and environmental impacts caused by transgene flow from genetically engineered (GE) crops have stimulated worldwide biosafety concerns. To determine transgene flow frequencies resulted from pollination is the first critical step for assessing such impacts, in addition to the determination of transgene expression and fitness in crop-wild hybrid descendants. Two methods are commonly used to estimate pollen-mediated gene flow (PMGF) frequencies: field experimenting and mathematical modeling. Field experiments can provide relatively accurate results but are time/resource consuming. Modeling offers an effective complement for PMGF experimental assessment. However, many published models describe PMGF by mathematical equations and are practically not easy to use. To increase the application of PMGF modeling for the estimation of transgene flow, we established a tool to calculate PMGF frequencies based on a quasi-mechanistic PMGF model for wind-pollination species. This tool includes a calculating program displayed by an easy-operating interface. PMGF frequencies of different plant species can be quickly calculated under different environmental conditions by including a number of biological and wind speed parameters that can be measured in the fields/laboratories or obtained from published data. The tool is freely available in the public domain (http://ecology.fudan.edu.cn/userfiles/cn/files/Tool_Manual.zip). Case studies including rice, wheat, and maize demonstrated similar results between the calculated frequencies based on this tool and those from published PMGF data. This PMGF calculating tool will provide useful information for assessing and monitoring social-economic and environmental impacts caused by transgene flow from GE crops. This tool can also be applied to determine the isolation distances between GE and non-GE crops in a coexistence agro-ecosystem, and to ensure the purity of certified seeds by setting proper isolation distances among field production plots.
Highlights
The extensive cultivation of genetically engineered (GE) crops has stimulated worldwide concerns over biosafety issues (Timmons et al 1996; Mehrotra and Goyal 2013)
The undesired social-economic and environmental impacts caused by transgene flow from a GE crop to its
Based on the published quasi-mechanistic pollen-mediated gene flow (PMGF) model (Wang et al 2016), we constructed a tool/software that can accurately calculate PMGF frequencies of windpollination plant species by the inclusion of four biological and one climatic parameters. This tool can be applied by any users who are not familiar with mathematical modelling, provided that the required biological and climatic parameters are available. These parameters can be measured either directly at the target field sites/laboratories or obtained from relevant published data, without conducting a specific PMGF experiment, which makes the estimate of PMGF frequencies relatively easy and practical under different environmental conditions
Summary
The extensive cultivation of genetically engineered (GE) crops has stimulated worldwide concerns over biosafety issues (Timmons et al 1996; Mehrotra and Goyal 2013). The assessment of transgene flow and its potential impacts includes the estimation of (trans)gene flow frequencies, transgene expression in crop-wild/weed hybrid descendants, and fitness effects caused by transgenes (Stewart et al 2003; Snow et al 2008; Lu and Yang 2009; Lu et al 2016). The determination of (trans)gene flow frequencies is the first key step to assess the potential social-economic and environmental impacts caused by transgene introgression into wild/weedy relative species (Ellstrand 1992, 2003; Yong and Kim 2001; Lu and Snow 2005; Loureiro et al 2009; Lu and Yang 2009; Ellstrand et al 2013)
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