2017/08 - The Wheat Genome Sequence Odyssey

Excerpts

"One of the first steps was to determine what should be sequenced: progenitors of bread wheat, or one of the diploid, tetraploid, or hexaploidy wheats. Industry and growers made the choice simple. They unanimously supported sequencing what is growing on 95% of wheat fields, the hexaploid bread wheat genome, Triticum aestivum, and preferably the variety for which the most genetic stocks exist and which could be translated quickly into breeding programmes. [...] In the landscape of rapidly changing sequencing technologies, it was critical to select an approach that would be “technology neutral”, i.e. one that would allow them to build resources that could be used regardless of the sequencing technology available at the time. Then, the only technology neutral foundation was a BAC-based physical map."

"What started with 4 people in 2005, has now grown to 1800 members working in more than 530 institutes or companies in 62 countries. The IWGSC reached its goal of generating a high-quality reference sequence of bread wheat, a significant milestone for agriculture and the scientific community and now work will focus on manual and functional annotation of the reference sequence as well as sequence improvement."

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