Wikimedia, Hans HillewaertDecoding our daily bread
Species: Bread wheat, Triticum aestivum
Genome size: ~17 billion base pairs
Bread wheat is the third most-produced crop after maize and rice, and accounts for one fifth of all the calories consumed by humans each year. Naturally, then, researchers want to find ways to improve yields. But the bread wheat genome has long defied complete sequencing, largely because it’s so big—roughly 5 times the size of the human genome—and because it’s a complex hybrid comprising three separate genomes.
Now, researchers have used whole-genome shotgun techniques to generate a draft of its hexaploid genome, and compared it with the sequences of its diploid ancestral and progenitor genomes. They showed that many genes were lost in domestication, and identified several classes of genes involved in energy harvesting, ...
