Breaking bread: Science cracks the wheat genome

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 per cent of the total calories consumed by humans across the globe.

“For the first time, we have co-ordinates 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.”

The wheat genome is the most complicated plant genome to be sequenced to date, said Kellye Eversole, director of the International Wheat Genome Consortium, who oversaw the project.

It is exceedingly long — 40 times longer than the rice genome and five times longer than the human genome.

It is also extraordinarily complex. It consists of three distinct subgenomes and contains many repetitive sequences.

“The different subgenomes are about 97 per cent identical, and that was a big part of the problem,” Dubcovsky said. “It is difficult to put together a puzzle when so many of the pieces look the same.”

To tackle this challenge, wheat researchers from around the world formed the International Wheat Genome Consortium in 2005.

To make the task of sequencing the monster genome more manageable, the group decided to give collaborators just one of wheat’s 21 chromosomes, or packages of DNA, to sequence.

“Generally, different countries took on a chromosome. So Australia got 7A, Norway got 7B, Japan had 6B, etc.” said Rudi Appels, a professor of genetics at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, who helped lead the effort.

In the intervening years since the project launched, other groups have claimed to have assembled the full sequence of the wheat genome. But the recently released genome, published Thursday in Science, is far more complete and detailed, the authors said.

The new work includes the order of the DNA bases on each chromosome, as well as where different clusters of genes live on each of those chromosomes.

“We now know the exact position of the approximately 108,000 wheat genes, and we know their direct genomic sequence context which contains all the information about how genes are regulated in time and space,” said Nils Stein of the Leibniz Institute of plant genetics and crop research in Germany, who worked on the study.

Appel equates the new work to having a Google map of the plant’s genome.

“We can navigate to any point on the map, so if we want to find a cluster of genes associated with drought tolerance we can go there,” he said.

Wheat is grown on more acres than any other plant on the planet, in part because it is an especially flexible plant. For example, although bread wheat originated in the Middle East, it has also been successful in the cold, damp climates of Europe and Canada.

But scientists say that as the human population continues to grow, making improvements to wheat could play an essential role in limiting food scarcity.