Amaizeing oversight

A report published in Nature last November by authors claiming to have identified transgenic DNA from genetically modified (GM) maize in crops in Oaxaca, Mexico, ignited fears that GM traits had been transferred to non-GM corn far from any GM plantings. But in the rush to sound a new alarm about GM crops, it seems that few people, including the reviewers for Nature, stopped to examine what the researchers had actually proved.

In the original article, researchers from the University of California at Berkeley used PCR to amplify sequences from the cauliflower mosaic virus (CMV) promoter, an element in many constructs used to create transgenic plants, to show the introgression of transgenic plants into the local crops...