On Friday, the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium published the first presentation of a high-quality, complete sequence of the bread wheat genome – which scientists had long thought to be an insurmountable task.
Researchers from the universities of Haifa and Tel Aviv, along with Israeli high-tech company NRGene – founded by ex-IDF intelligence officers from the army's vaunted 8200 technological unit – were part of the yearslong international project comprising more than 200 researchers from 20 countries.
Wheat has five times more DNA than humans. Its fully annotated sequence provides the location of over 107,000 genes and more than 4 million genetic markers across the plant's 21 chromosomes. For a staple crop that feeds a third of the world's population, mapping wheat's genome is a milestone that may be on par with the day its domestication began 9,000 years ago, according to wired.com.
Now that scientists and farmers have discovered the genes and factors responsible for traits such as wheat's yield, grain quality, resistance to fungal diseases, and tolerance to environmental stress, they will be able to produce hardier wheat varieties.
Professor Tzion Fahima – head of the Evolutionary and Environmental Biology Department and the head of the Laboratory of Plant Genomics and Disease Resistance in the Institute of Evolution at the University of Haifa – was part of the Israeli team that helped with the research, which spanned a period of 13 years.
According to Fahima, in order to meet the world's projected food consumption needs in 2050, when the global population is expected to reach 10 billion, wheat production has to be increased by about 1.6% per year. In recent years, however, wheat production has only increased about half that amount.
"Having [wheat] breeders take the information we've provided to develop varieties that are more adapted to local areas is really, we think, the foundation of feeding our population in the future," said Kellye Eversole, the executive director of the consortium.
