IWGSC Newsletter – October 2021 to January 2022

The IWGSC

• Membership
  The IWGSC has 3,300 members, working at 913 institutions/companies in 71 countries.

• Sponsors
  • Currently, the IWGSC has 10 sponsor .
  • In October and December, we were pleased to welcome two new sponsors:
    • CIMMYT, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center. The organization will be represented in the IWGSC Coordinating Committee by Susanne Dreisigacker, wheat molecular breeding laboratory lead. Read the press release.
    • Curio Genomics, a bioinformatics company providing a user-friendly, dynamic real-time data visualization platform. Shawn Quinn, Curio’s co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, will be joining the IWGSC Coordinating Committee. Read the press release.
  • We put the spotlight on RAGT – a seed company that has supported the IWGSC since 2009 – including an interview with John Baison, RAGT representative in the IWGSC Coordinating Committee, and Chris Burt, IWGSC Board member.
  • Sponsor support is essential to ensure continuation of activities. Please inform us if you know of any potential sponsors (research institutes, universities, governmental agencies, or companies).

Projects

• IWGSC RefSeq Assembly and Annotation
  • As a reminder, revised versions of the wheat genome reference sequence assembly (IWGSC RefSeq v2.1) and annotation (IWGSC RefSeq annotation v2.1) are now available at the IWGSC data repository hosted by URGI-INRAE without restriction.
  • Detailed information on how IWGSC RefSeq v2.1 and IWGSC RefSeq annotation v2.1 were developed are available on this page.
  • The article outlining these new resources is available in open access at Plant J, 107: 303-314.

• IWGSC RefSeq Annotation – Contribute to future annotation releases
  The annotation of the IWGSC Chinese Spring RefSeq is in continuous improvement. If your team works on a specific gene family, we can integrate your expert annotation into a future release. If you encounter what you believe is an error in the sequence or annotation, please let us know. Send a GFF file of your favorite genes or concerns and a short description of your dataset to INRAE GDEC contacts: Frédéric Choulet and Hélène Rimbert.

• IWGSC-Arbor Biosciences Promoter Capture
  A target capture panel for promoters and other regulatory elements in wheat is now available from Daicel Arbor Biosciences. The panel is designed to capture ~168 Mbp of genomic space as measured on RefSeq v1.0, with the target selection spearheaded by Jorge Dubcovsky at UC Davis (and HHMI) in collaboration with researchers from INRAE. View the poster presented virtually at PAG XXIX for more details on set composition and behavior. The probe set is available as either a standalone NGS myBaits enrichment kit or can be used in a full-service myReads package, with both options including bioinformatics via Curio Genomics. Please contact Daicel Arbor Biosciences for more information.

• Genomic Tools
  IWGSC sponsors Curio Genomics and Daicel Arbor Biosciences announced on 20 January the launch of the cloud-based fully integrated bioinformatics platform myCurio™, an integration of myCurio into Arbor's myBaits™ and myReads™ custom NGS products and services.
  If you have any suggestions of genomics tools or resources that would be useful for the wheat community, please contact Kellye Eversole.

News

• 10 October 2021 – In the Media – The Science Behind Your Salad podcast on Wheat, featuring interviews with Kellye Eversole, Alison Bentley (CIMMYT) and John Jacobs (BASF).
• 19 October 2021 – Announcement – The IWGSC Early Career Award becomes the IWGSC and Catherine Feuillet Early Career Award
• 21 October 2021 – Press release – CIMMYT Joins the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium
• 1 November 2021 – Announcement – Ellie Taagen is awarded the IWGSC and Catherine Feuillet Early Career Award
• 7 December 2021 – Press release – Curio Genomics Joins the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium
• 20 January 2022 – Press release – Curio Genomics and Daicel Arbor Biosciences Deliver Fully Integrated myCurio™ Bioinformatics Platform

People

• Leader Spotlight on Rudi Appels
• An interview with John Baison and Chris Burt (RAGT, UK)
• Early Career Awardee profile: Ellie Taagen

Workshops

The IWGSC held two workshops at PAG 2022 (8 to 12 January 2022) that pivoted at the last minute from an in-person event in San Diego to a virtual meeting. Shoot out to the PAG organizers for providing a platform for the workshops to take place and to all the presenters for their flexibility and availability (sometimes late at night!).

• IWGSC main workshop: program & slides – speaker profiles – This was the most attended workshop at PAG 2022!
• IWGSC From Structural to Functional Wheat Genomics Workshop: program & slides
• IWGSC Poster

Webinars

IWGSC webinars are FREE and scheduled on Thursdays at 11:00am, Eastern US time. If you cannot join us at that time, the recordings are posted shortly after the live webinars on the IWGSC YouTube channel . Subscribe to the channel to never miss a new upload!

If you have suggestions for topics or speakers, please let us know .

Upcoming webinars

• 24 February: "Solving a 100-year old mystery: Cloning the P1 locus in Triticum polonicum" presented by Nikolai Adamski (John Innes Centre, UK)
  Register here

• 24 March: "Evolution of recombination landscapes in diverging populations of bread wheat" presented by Alice Danguy des Déserts (INRAE-Université Clermont-Auvergne, FR)
  Register here

• 21 April: "The Ph1/ZIP4 story: stabilization of wheat as a polyploid and preservation of grain number" presented by Azahara Martin (John Innes Centre, UK)
  Register here

Past webinars

In case you missed our past webinars, you can watch all recordings on the IWGSC YouTube channel . Slides of the presentations & Q&A sessions are also available on the website.

Since the last edition of the newsletter, we organized the following webinars:

• Presentation Skills for Brainiacs - How to present to people who have no idea what you’re talking about presented by Laura Foley, Presentation Strategist.
• Wheat to eat: accelerating plant breeding to address global food & nutrition security presented by Alison Bentley (Director of CIMMYT Global Wheat Program)
• Interaction between wheat cis- and trans-factors in shaping regulatory networks presented by Yijing Zhang (Fudan University, China)
• Challenges and opportunities in positional cloning and structural variation in polyploid crops presented by Ellie Taagen (Cornell University, USA)
• Developing sustainable strategies to protect wheat roots from take-all disease presented by Javier Palma-Guerrero (Rothamsted Research, UK)
• Recombination and chromatin landscapes in the wheat genome presented by Ian Henderson (University of Cambridge, UK)

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