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Under the leadership of Mingcheng Luo and Jan Dvorak (UC Davis, CA, USA) and with funding from the US National Science Foundation, an improved version of the reference wheat genome has been completed and is being released in advance of publication to the scientific community under the terms of Toronto agreement which affords the data producers the right to publish the first whole genome analyses of the data.

The genome assembly of Triticum aestivum cv. Chinese Spring (IWGSC RefSeq v1.0; IWGSC, 2018 ) was improved using whole genome optical maps and contigs assembled from whole-genome-shotgun (WGS) PacBio SMRT reads ( Zimin et al. 2017 ). Optical maps were used to detect and resolve chimeric scaffolds, anchor unassigned scaffolds, correct ambiguities in positions and orientations of scaffolds, create super-scaffolds, and estimate gap sizes more accurately. PacBio contigs were used for gap closing. Pseudomolecules of the Chinese Spring 21 chromosomes were re-constructed to develop a new reference sequence, IWGSC RefSeq v2.0. All revisions involved approximately 10% sequence length of the IWGSC RefSeq v1.0.

Importantly, please note that this version has yet to be annotated. The IWGSC annotation team will be performing targeted annotation and QC of IWGSC RefSeq v2.0. In addition, all manually curated genes submitted to the IWGSC by the end of August 2019 (see call for contributions ) will be integrated into IWGSC RefSeq v2.0, annotation v2.0. The IWGSC aims to release the annotation v2.0 in January 2020.

How to access the data

Access does require registration. For specific access terms, see the IWGSC General Data Access agreement .

• Individuals who have not signed the IWGSC Data Access Agreement should FIRST register on the IWGSC website or login if you are already registered, and THEN sign the Agreement ; URGI login details will be provided subsequently for access to the data.
• Individuals who have already signed the IWGSC Data Access Agreement can go directly to the URGI website to access the data using their URGI login details. If you forgot your URGI credentials, please send an email to urgi-support@inra.fr

Link to download the data (note: URGI login necessary): https://urgi.versailles.inra.fr/download/iwgsc/IWGSC_RefSeq_Assemblies/v2.0/