The International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium

Bread wheat, the staple food for 35% of the world’s population and the most widely produced crop, is one of the last important crop species to benefit from a comprehensive set of high quality genomic resources. Genomics offers powerful tools for understanding the molecular basis of phenotypic variation as well as accelerating gene cloning, marker assisted selection, and more efficient exploitation of genetic diversity.

The International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium (IWGSC), with 1,400 members in 59 countries, is an international, collaborative consortium, established in 2005 by a group of wheat growers, plant scientists, and public and private breeders. The goal of the IWGSC is to produce a high quality annotated reference genome sequence for bread wheat as a foundation for future research and breeding efforts in wheat improvement.

Adopting a milestone-based, adaptable strategy with short- and mid-term goals to meet the challenges of sequencing the large, hexaploid genome, the IWGSC focused initially on the production of physical maps anchored to genetic maps for each of the 21 individual bread wheat chromosomes. Subsequent sequencing projects included sequencing of minimal tiling paths of mapped BACs, a chromosome-based survey sequence of the genome that has provided early access to genic sequences and a whole genome assembly using the NRGene DeNovoMAGIC^TM software. By integrating the whole genome and chromosome data with the BAC-based resources (sequences, physical maps, WGP tags), the IWGSC expects to complete the reference sequence of hexaploid bread wheat cv. Chinese Spring by 2017. An overview of the activities will be presented.