Are tulips with tulip breaking virus GMOs?

[Anaglyph]

@Red_Stilettos

So, a wild-type, unengineered tulip mosaic virus is not recombinant or GMO. A tulip infected with the virus is also not GMO, because the process of genetic modifcation that results from the infection has not been intentionally modified by humans.

It’s a slippery slope because introducing tulip mosaic virus into a line that hasn’t previously been infected does result in genetic changes that were intended by humans. But, the vehicle doing the modification (the virus) is not modified, it’s just doing what it’s always done. We (scientists, regulators, etc.) don’t consider that GMO, but one could easily make the argument that it is.

On the other hand, if I intentionally delete some genes of the virus to cripple it in such a way that it can no longer propagate and infect more tulips and spread, but remains confined to the offspring of the tulip originally infected by the modified virus, these tulips would qualify as GMOs.