Starting about twenty years ago, the pace of research on crops that hybridize with weedy relatives really took off. Over the years, researchers have debated whether or not crop alleles are likely to survive in the wild, with some arguing that low hybrid fitness and/or linkage to maladaptive domestication traits could severely hamper crop allele persistence. Now, mounting evidence shows that many crop-weed-wild gene pools are not discrete, but frequently mix and overlap as inter-breeding hybrid populations.