A research team from the British universities of Bristol and Liverpool has succeeded in sequencing the wheat genome, a development expected to have considerable influence in the food industry. The team will make the sequence available to crop breeders.
The University of Liverpool was awarded a £1.7 million research grant to undertake the work just six months ago, but the final sprint came at the end of a project that has taken researchers in a number of institutions over 15 years to complete.
“The information we have collected will be invaluable in tackling the problem of global food shortage. We are now working to analyse the sequence to highlight natural genetic variation between wheat types, which will help significantly speed up the current program,” said Professor Neil Hall of the Institute of Integrative Biology at the University of Liverpool, who headed the project.
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