Welcome to WheatGenome.info
Wheat is probably the most important crop in the world, yet it has one of the most challenging genomes. Bread wheat is a hexaploid, with three complete genomes termed A, B and D in the nucleus of each cell. Each of these genomes is almost twice of the human genome and consists of around 5,500 million letters. Several groups around the world are working towards sequencing wheat. Details of individual efforts can be found on the wiki below.
Genome sequencing projects can be generally divided into whole genome shotgun (WGS) methods or BAC by BAC methods.
WGS attempts to sequence the genome in one go, by generating a large amount of sequence data and then assembling this to produce a representation of the string of letters which make up the genome. WGS has the benefit in that it is quick and relatively inexpensive, but it is often confounded by the inability to stitch the individual sequence reads together, resulting in a poor quality assembly. This is particularly problematic for polyploids, where more than one genome is present in each cell, or where there is a substantial quantity of repetitive sequences. Wheat is a polyploid with 3 genomes, each of which is 80% repetitive, making WGS unattractive.
The alternative BAC by BAC approach requires breaking the genome down to relatively small pieces (c. 120 kbp), ordering these as a minimal tiling path, then sequencing each of the BACs in the tiling path. While sequence assembly or repetitive regions remains problematic, this approach offers the potential to produce the best quality finished genome. However, BAC by BAC sequencing of wheat is hugely expensive, time consuming and is still not guaranteed to produce a complete genome due to some regions being underrepresented in BAC libraries.
Individual chromosome arms are being assembled and annotated. They are made publically available as they are produced using the genome viewer GBrowse2.
Links to available chromosome arms are below.
All chromosome arm specific sequence data is available at TAGdb.
All raw and assembled sequence data is freely available on request.
Wheat genome assembly BLAST portal www.wheatgenome.info/gbrowseblast
There is a large and increasing range of wheat genome resources available on the web. If you cannot find what you are looking for here, you may want to try some of the sites below.
Others: If we have missed a link to your site, please contact the web admin
Please cite: WheatGenome.info: An integrated database and portal for wheat genome information. Kaitao Lai, Paul J Berkman, Michal Tadeusz Lorenc, Christopher Duran, Lars Smits, Sahana Manoli, Jiri Stiller, David Edwards. Plant and Cell Physiology (2012) 53(2): e2.
The site is supported by funds from the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics, the University of Queensland and the Australian Research Council. We are grateful to Bioplatforms Australia for their contribution of sequence data