This landmark resource builds on international efforts in this area and will help wheat breeders accelerate their crop improvement programmes and researchers to discover genes for key traits such as yield, nutrient use and bread-making quality. As wheat is one of the world’s most vital crops, the new genomics resources will help secure future food supplies.
The wheat genome is now assembled into fewer and much larger chunks of DNA and covers regions that previous assemblies did not reach, such as complicated highly repetitive regions that form about 80 per cent of the DNA sequences.
Matt Clark, Group Leader at TGAC, who led the sequencing work, said: “Wheat has a very large and complex genome. It’s has been a complex problem that has confounded scientists for several years.”
Reaching this milestone has been a major UK-based effort to identify and understand wheat genes and develop insights into the links between them to aid breeding programmes. In this latest development, billions of bases needed to be sequenced and the assembly (a gigantic jigsaw puzzle using billions of pieces that are very similar to each other) took three weeks to complete on one of the UK’s largest supercomputers, which was specially configured for work on wheat.
To assemble the wheat genome, Bernardo Clavijo, Algorithms Research and Development Team Leader at TGAC, made major modifications to a software, called DISCOVAR, developed by the Broad Institute. In order to ensure all the complexity of the DNA sequence was preserved during assembly, he made a series of major overhauls to the software.
These advances now mean the software can assemble several wheat genomes with high speed and great precision. This sets the stage for rapidly generating useful assemblies of many varieties of wheat, which is an essential step for breeding and research. Mike Bevan from the John Innes Centre (JIC) (Co-Principal Investigator), said: “The capacity to sequence and assemble many wheat genomes efficiently breaks down major barriers to wheat crop improvement. We will now be able to exploit genetic variation from ancestral wheat varieties for crop improvement in new ways.”
The early release of the data as a new resource for the world wheat researchers and breeders reflects the Wheat Initiative’s founding principles of sharing data and seeking synergy through collaboration to help tackle the global grand challenge of feeding a population of nearly 10 billion by 2050. The data will be available for sequence searches (BLAST) at TGAC’s Grassroot Genomics platform from 12 November 2015. The full data set, with genes identified, will be publicly available from the European Bioinformatics Institute’s (EBI) Ensembl database at the end of 2015. This is a key milestone in the BBSRC funded research project “Triticeae Genomics for Sustainable Agriculture” in collaboration with TGAC, JIC, the European Bioinformatics Institute and Rothamsted Research.
TGAC is strategically funded by BBSRC and operates a National Capability to promote the application of genomics and bioinformatics to advance bioscience research and innovation.
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