Milwaukee ? In an evolutionary blink of an eye, wild populations of agricultural crops could be obliterated by their genetically altered descendants.

Like an army of plant barbarians, these high-tech crops have the potential to invade, pillage — and possibly recruit — neighboring populations of ancestral crops by repeatedly blasting them with their DNA.

And according to researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Minnesota-St. Paul, relic populations of wild crops could be erased or transformed in just a matter of a few generations — possibly in less than a decade.

This is a concern not only for basic species conservation, but it could also mean the loss of an important reservoir of genetic diversity and information, said Hugh Iltis, a retired UW botany professor who discovered and described one of the earliest forms of wild corn.

“Wild plants are very precious,” said Iltis, who did not contribute to this study. “You lose them and you lose a treasure of information.”

In addition, the study indicates that genes designed for insect and pest resistance could potentially jump from agricultural crops to related weed species — spawning an army of unstoppable weed warriors.

“There has been a lot of hand waving about the effects of GMOs (genetically modified organisms)” on wild populations of plants, said Don Waller, professor of botany and environmental studies at UW-Madison. “But this is solid evidence using a rigorous model” to show that these fears are founded.

The research, which appeared in this week’s edition of the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, is based on mathematical models that predict the rate of gene transfer between neighboring plant populations.

The model doesn’t apply just to genetically modified crops, it’s more universal, said Ralph Haygood, a zoology post-doctoral fellow at UW-Madison and an author on the paper.

Their findings could spur research on the effects of genetically modified organisms on their wild, weedy progenitors — a hot topic in biotechnology and environmental studies.

Haygood’s team built a model based on the laws of population genetics, paying close attention to the manner and speed that genes move between related plants.

They looked specifically at two evolutionary processes: genetic assimilation — crop genes replacing the wild plants’ genes — and demographic swamping.

Swamping occurs after genetic assimilation. As the wild population picks up genes from surrounding crops, the small native patch begins to shrink. The patch eventually becomes so inundated with mongrel pollen that “migrational meltdown” occurs, and the wild population is erased.