Genetic engineering (GMO) is NOT an extension of conventional plant breeding.

[mike_c]

48. with all due respect....

Good luck with your studies. I'd urge you to consider courses in cellular and molecular biology, and biotechnology, both to enhance your CV and your employment prospects-- assuming you want to continue to graduate studies and enter a biomedical field-- and also to improve your credibility among your colleagues. I don't think some of those things mean what you think they mean.

To wit: no one says that selective plant breeding is the same as transgenic engineering with any kind of face, straight or otherwise. What is said, however, is that the outcome of plant transformation is conceptually indistinguishable from that of selective breeding. Genetic information is transferred from one individual to another. That is all genetic engineering is-- information transfer that bypasses reproductive isolation.

Consider this-- why do you think it is so easy to accomplish transformation? In practical terms the only difficult part of the process is overcoming reproductive isolation (at least until the screening begins), i.e. getting the desired genes inserted into the target genome. The scary sounding methods referenced in the OP-- gene guns, bacterial and viral vectors, and electroporation for instance, are all means of insertion, Once there, they are transcribed and translated completely normally. They're just information, and information is universal. Lateral gene transfer is freaking common among prokaryotes, probably more common and important for evolution than vertical transfer. Multicellular eukaryotes have different evolutionary constraints, but at the cellular level they're just biochemical machines that decode information in the genome and express it on the biochemical factory floor of the cytoplasm. How that information gets there is irrelevant to the outcome.