Leader Spotlight

Kellye Eversole has been at the helm of the IWGSC since its inception in 2005 and has been instrumental in all developments and successes of the consortium, relentlessly advocating and pursuing the vison and ultimate goal of the consortium to develop genomic tools to advance wheat research and breeding.

Rudi Appels is well known in the IWGSC as he has been at the heart and soul of the consortium since its inception in 2005. He was instrumental in the creation of the consortium, having initiated, along with Bikram Gill, discussions with interested colleagues on sequencing the wheat genome, at the ITMI meeting in Winnipeg in 2002, and organized, in 2003 in Washington, the first workshop designed to push forward the sequencing of the bread wheat genome.

Philippa has been a member of the IWGSC since 2012 and joined the Coordinating Committee in 2018. Philippa worked on wheat since the beginning of her career. In 2016, while doing a BBSRC fellowship at the John Innes Centre (JIC), she, with colleagues Ricardo Ramírez-González and Cristobal Uauy, developed a gene expression atlas for wheat (wheat-expression.com) and was invited by the IWGSC to analyze transcriptomic data for the RefSeqv1.0 genome project and incorporate the data into their gene expression atlas.

Delfina Barabaschi has been involved with the IWGSC since 2008 when she worked on the physical mapping of chromosome 5A using a BAC-based approach, different assembly strategies, several genetic and genomic tools, and complementary anchoring approaches. Delfina led the project in collaboration with several Italian and International partners (including: IGA in Udine, Italy; IEB in Olomouc, Czech Republic; EEB at the University of Haifa, Israel). In 2017, she manually curated the annotation of C-Repeat Binding Factors (CBF) genes – controlling the capacity of wheat to survive during winter – that was integrated in RefSeq Annotation v1.1 published in 2018 in the journal Science . Delfina joined the IWGSC Coordinating Committee in 2019.

Gabriel Keeble-Gagnère has been involved with the IWGSC since 2010. His first contributions were on the BAC-based assembly of chromosome 7A, as part of Rudi Appels’ group. This work involved collaborating with many groups in Australia as well as overseas since there was not much experience working with large BAC assemblies in Australia. Gabriel worked very closely with the team he is now part of at Agriculture Victoria, including Matthew Hayden and Josquin Tibbits, as well as Philippe Rigault at Gydle in Canada. As a result, they were able to produce high quality assemblies of regions of 7A (published in Genome Biology in 2018), including “finished” regions of particular interest.

Hélène Rimbert joined the IWGSC in 2016, as part of the Annotation Team lead by Frédéric Choulet at GDEC. Throughout 2017, she worked with colleagues at PGSB (Germany) and The Earlham Institute (UK) to produce the IWGSC RefSeq annotation v1.0., an accomplishment for which she was awarded an IWGSC Leadership Award in January 2018. She then continued working on improving this first version of the annotation by integrating data collected in research teams, leading to the release of Annotation v1.1 in July 2018. Hélène and her colleagues at GDEC are currently working on a new, improved version of the annotation (v2.0), scheduled for release in early 2020.

Jaroslav Doležel has been involved in the efforts to sequence the wheat genome since before the birth of the IWGSC, as his team pioneered flow sorting of wheat chromosomes and constructed the first BAC library of a wheat chromosome in 2002. When the IWGSC was created in 2005, the consensus was that the only way to tackle the complexity of the wheat genome was to use a chromosome by chromosome strategy. Over the next 12 years, Jaroslav’s team optimized the procedure and relentlessly worked on the production of 45 chromosome – or chromosome-arm – specific BAC libraries for the 21 wheat chromosomes.

PGSB (formerly MIPS) has been engaged in the development of plant genome bioinformatics for over 15 years and has generated annotation for many plant genomes. The main focus of Manuel’s work include gene prediction and annotation, genome structure, expression and gene family analyses and comparative genomics. Manuel is also the database manager of PGSB PlantsDB, where genomic data from wheat (and many other plants) are structured, integrated and visualized.

Jane Rogers has been part of the IWGSC since its beginning. She was instrumental in helping the consortium develop its strategic roadmaps during the first 5 years and joined the IWGSC Coordinating Committee in 2008, representing The Genome Analysis Centre (TGAC, now Earlham Institut), to work on the development of physical maps for several chromosomes. In 2010, she started leading the IWGSC chromosome survey sequencing initiative which resulted in the publication of the chromosome-based draft sequence in Science in July 2014.

Cristobal Uauy research is focused on using genetics and genomics to identify genes involved in wheat productivity traits – such as grain size and shape, pre-harvest sprouting, and resistance to the wheat yellow rust pathogen. With his team, he aims to understand the mechanisms by which these genes function and to translate this knowledge into improved wheat varieties for growers, industry, and consumers.