'Plant Breeding: Sustaining the Future' Abstracts of the XVIth EUCARPIA Congress, Edinburgh, Scotland, 10-14 September 2001 PREVENTING OR REDUCING THE DISPERSAL OF FUNCTIONAL POLLEN FROM TRANSGENIC CROPS B. FEIL, P. STAMP Institute of Plant Sciences, ETHZ, Universitatstr 2, CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland

The dispersal of functional pollen from GM crops can be reduced or even prevented by growing-male sterile GM plants in a mixture with male-fertile wild-type plants; the wild-type plants act as pollen donors for the GM plants.  In cases like transgenic herbicide resistance, male-fertile GM plants can replace the wild-type pollen donors, thus reducing the release of viable GM pollen by about 80%.  This method can be applied to all crops that produce a sufficient surplus of pollen, such as maize and rapeseed.  A positive side effect of growing cms maize is an often-increased yield compared with their isogenic male-fertile counterparts.