Historical Foundational Projects

The IWGSC has coordinated and endorsed projects to generate reference sequences for the 21 bread wheat chromosomes.

With partners in 15 countries, the IWGSC has produced a survey sequence for the genome of the bread wheat cultivar Chinese Spring based on Illumina short read sequence assemblies of each of the 21 chromosomes. Sponsored primarily by Graminor, Biogemma, INRA, and TGAC, this initiative led by Jane Rogers was published in Science in July 2014.

The IWGSC has coordinated and endorsed projects delivering BAC-based physical maps anchored to genetic maps for each of the 21 bread wheat chromosomes (T. aestivum cv Chinese Spring). The physical maps for all chromosomes were completed by the end of 2015.

To assist the international bread wheat genome sequencing effort, a high quality draft of the genome of Aegilops tauschii, one of the three progenitors of bread wheat, was produced.

The project aimed to develop a high-resolution radiation hybrid map of the hexaploid wheat D-genome chromosomes to study their gene distribution and organization.

BAC libraries of flow sorted chromosomes have been developed at the Institute of Experimental Botany (IEB) (Olomouc, Czech Republic) and are archived at the CNRGV (INRAE, France).