0
Home
News
Directory
E-newsletter
Magazine
Events
Data
AgReport
Subscribe
Wheat genome sequencing on track
Jan. 7, 2015
The International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium (IWGSC) announced that it has completed high quality physical maps for 6 additional wheat chromosome arms. This major achievement on the path towards a high quality reference sequence of the bread wheat genome will provide invaluable tools to speed up breeding of new wheat varieties.
Physical maps are the foundation to obtain a complete reference sequence of the bread wheat genome, expected by 2017-18 if funding is available. As part of its roadmap, the IWGSC is currently working on establishing physical maps of the 21 chromosomes of bread wheat. The results announced concern the chromosome arms 2BL, 2BS, 4BL, 4BS, 5DL and 5BL, which complement the physical maps already available for 12 chromosomes.
IWGSC adopted the Keygene Whole Genome Profiling® (WGP™) technology as its standard since it provides a robust framework for physical mapping and sequencing individual chromosomes of the highly complex and repetitive wheat genome. Edwin van der Vossen, Vice President Field Crops at KeyGene comments: "Together with the IWGSC, we are convinced that the physical maps that we generated using the KeyGene's WGP™ sequence based method provide a sound foundation for the reference quality genome sequence of hexaploid wheat, irrespective of the sequencing platform and strategy used. I am confident that these results will play an important role in increasing wheat production for future generations."
This achievement was made possible by a € 1 million contribution from Bayer Crop Science. "With this new piece of information now available to us we can speed up our breeding efforts and map based cloning projects for trait improvement,” says Catherine Feuillet, head of trait R&D at Bayer Crop Sciences.
The next step is to obtain a high quality reference sequence for each bread wheat chromosome. This will provide an accurate representation of the structure and organization of sequences along individual chromosomes and enable the precise locations of genes, regulatory elements, repetitive elements and sequence-based markers of different kinds to be identified. With a chromosome-based full sequence in hand, plant breeders will have high quality information at their disposal to accelerate breeding programs and to determine how genes control complex traits such as quality, yield, drought tolerance or durable disease resistance.
More from AgroNews
Change
Hot TopicSubscribe
| Subscribe Email: | * | |
| Name: | ||
| Mobile Number: | ||
Comment
0/1200
NEWSLETTER