In the race to produce drought-resistant crop varieties, conventional breeders have proven they can meet the challenge [to] perform well under both water sufficient and deficient conditions. In the meantime, the transgenic, or GM, front must first go through a gene-discovery phase, sifting through entire genomes for those sequences that can nudge plant physiology to make better use of available water. [...] However, the complexity of a plant’s response to water stress tends to cause drought-tolerance transgenes to have additional, usually unpredictable, and often unwanted effects on other traits, including yield and quality.