Wheat genome sequence study completed

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Local News

August 18, 2018 - 4:00 AM

It has been called the Mount Everest of the genome world, and it has just been scaled.

This week a consortium of more than 200 scientists from 20 countries published the first fully annotated sequence of the massive wheat genome, a feat they hope will eventually reduce the risk of food scarcity on our planet.

Experts said the new, publicly available research will help breeders improve the nutritional value and disease resistance of the grain, which is the most widely grown crop in the world, contributing about 20 percent of the total calories consumed by humans across the globe.

“For the first time, we have coordinates for all the genes that tell us where they are on the chromosomes,” said Jorge Dubcovsky, a wheat geneticist at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved with the work.” There are “a lot of things we can do a lot faster now that we have this genome.”

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