Complete wheat: Scientists successfully piece together bread wheat genome
Big news in tiny science: The wheat genome is finally complete.
Nature reports that a team of six scientists—including three from Johns Hopkins University—has successfully mapped the genome of bread wheat, Triticum aestivum, a task that researchers around the world have been trying to crack for more than a decade. Their hope is that understanding these basic building blocks will bolster efforts to improve the staple crop and breed strains of wheat that are more tolerant of climate change, drought, disease, or other environmental factors.
The results of the team’s work are published online in the journal GigaScience. Johns Hopkins researcher Aleksey Zimin is the lead author on the study; researcher Daniela Puiu and Steven Salzberg, a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins, were also part of the team.