2019 Annual Report

In 2019, we remain focused on the IWGSC Phase II vision of enhancing breeding through an increased understanding of the molecular basis of traits and their allelic diversity.

The impact of the high quality reference genome sequence, IWGSC RefSeq v1.0 continued to expand as illustrated by the publication between 2017 and 2019 of approximately 600 papers that utilized or referenced the sequence. An updated version of the reference sequence of bread wheat, IWGSC RefSeq v2.0, was released to the community in July under the Toronto pre-publication access agreement. This version used long read sequences and an optical map to close some of the gaps in the original reference. The annotation team has been busy integrating manual and functional annotation, with contributions from the community, and IWGSC RefSeq annotation v2.0 is expected to be released in 2020.

In October, Arbor Biosciences and the IWGSC announced the of cial release of the myBaits® Expert Wheat Exome capture panel. In late 2019, the IWGSC expanded its partnership with Arbor Biosciences and began designing a wheat promoter capture.

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