GMOs Could Wipe Out Natural Species

 http://ens-news.com/ens/jun2002/2002-06-21-09.asp#anchor6

WEST LAFAYETTE, Indiana, June 21, 2002 (ENS) - Genetically modified organisms introduced into wild populations could drive the natural species toward extinction, warn two Purdue University scientists.
William Muir, professor of animal sciences, and Richard Howard, professor of biology, used computer modeling and statistical analyses to examine the hypothetical risks of introducing genetically modified organisms into wild populations.
"We examined these hypothetical situations because the range of new transgenic organisms is almost unlimited," Muir said. "It is constructive for those developing such organisms to be able to anticipate how they could pose a hazard."
The new computer models have shown that the risk of extinction is greater than believed before, identifying three new scenarios in which genetically modified organisms (GMOs) could result in the extinction of a natural population.
"In the broadest sense, this research tells one how to do risk assessment and what GMOs need further containment," Muir said.
In 2000, Muir and Howard found that a release of fish that were larger - and therefore had higher mating success - but also had shorter life expectancy, could drive a wild population extinct in as few as 40 generations. Muir and Howard labeled this the "Trojan gene hypothesis."
Further investigation has found other scenarios that could also lead to extinction.
In one scenario, a genetic modification increases the size of the male, which results in the male finding more mates and also living longer. But if the modification also has a third effect of making the male less fertile, the predicted result is that the wild population will be extinct in just 20 generations.
"We consider this an extreme risk," Howard said. "That's the most severe time frame we've encountered so far."
Howard said this risk could arise if fertility was restricted in a genetically modified organism as a way to limit the spread of the gene in the natural population.
"This was the biggest surprise for me, that if you lowered fertility of genetically modified organism the time course to population extinction was faster rather than slower when the genetically modified young have better survival than wild type individuals," Howard said. "I still look at the graph of those data and find it amazing."
The researchers also found scenarios in which the introduced gene could spread through the population but not reduce the overall population size. The researchers termed this an invasion risk.
"The invasion risk is an unknown in assessing the overall risk," Howard said. "Given the biology, all we can say is that the gene would increase in the population. We don't know if that would cause a problem or not. In this case you wouldn't really know until you actually released the gene into the population."
The research appears in the current issue of the journal "Transgene Research."