Scientific data published by a peer-reviewed journal should be properly interpreted: a reply to the letter by Gressel et al. (2014).

Gressel et al. (2014; in this issue of New Phytologist, pp. 360–362) disapprove of media coverage of our recent peer-reviewed paper (Wang et al., 2014; this issue ofNewPhytologist, pp. 679–683), and they question whether the paper can be seen as ‘deserving publication’. In this study, our main hypothesis was that overproduction of a key metabolic enzyme (EPSPS) may have the unanticipated effect of stimulating plant growth and fecundity in crop–weed hybrids of rice (Oryza sativa). This enzyme is the target of glyphosate-based herbicides,which arewidely used on transgenic glyphosate-tolerant crops. We found that transgenic overexpression of an endogenous epsps gene from rice – which was developed to confer glyphosate resistance – was associated with increases in EPSPS protein levels, tryptophan concentrations, photosynthetic rates, seed germination, plant growth and fecundity of crop-weed rice progeny, relative to their nontransgenic counterparts. This transgenic event was crossed into four weedy rice accessions and tested under field conditions in China. Here, we address several of our critics’ questions and concerns, while noting that others fall outside the scope of our research and therefore are not relevant to the publication. Given the inherent constraints of conducting ecological field studies with strictly regulated, experimental transgenes, we argue that our paper is similar in scope and depth to many other publications in this field. However, in an effort to provide a concise summary of the work, we left out some important details that are included below. We appreciate the opportunity to address these gaps in the following section.