The rejection of these products in the US has been nowhere near the severity seen in Europe, but organizations such as Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club are attempting to rally the public to the same outrage. There are many objections to the foods. People fear the government has not done enough tests on the food to insure their safety. Just as bacteria are able to acquire resistance to antibiotics by transferring plasmids, there is a concern about the transference of these super-genes to weeds and bacteria. An unconfirmed rumor about transgenic potato genes being spread to laboratory rats caused the production of those potatoes to be halted until further tests could be done.
Some transgenic plants have a resistance to ampicillin.
It is feared this resistance could enter the genome of infectious bacteria and provide them resistance to the drug. If the weeds were somehow able to obtain genes through the pollen of engineered plants, they would become very difficult to kill. The need to detect these transgenic foods arises from several areas. Detection of the transgenic vectors is necessary to determine if the engineered traits are indeed being passed to other species. Detection would also be used to single out transgenically produced products to the purchasers of the goods.