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Aglobal research consortium has put forth the complete and annotated genome for bread wheat, published in a report today (August 17) in Science. Other studies using this reference wheat genome also appeared today in Science and Science Advances.
“Having breeders take the information we’ve provided to develop varieties that are more adapted to local areas is really, we think, the foundation of feeding our population in the future,” coauthor Kellye Eversole, the executive director of the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium, tells WIRED.
The wheat genome has been notoriously difficult to decipher in comparison to other grains such as rice, soybean, and corn, which were all sequenced previously. While the human genome has 3 billion DNA base pairs, wheat has 16 billion. Moreover, wheat presents a complex problem as bread wheat actually comprises three different sets of genes. In order to decode the genome of the world’s ...
