Wheat genome sequencing: a milestone in cereal genomics and its future potentials

Abstract

The cultivated cereals, including rice, maize, wheat, barley, rye, sorghum, oats and millets cater about half of the calories and proteins to the world population and are emerging purveyors of biofuel. In addition to their economic signifi- cance, cereals are a prominent choice for comparative genomics as they comprise important crops with diverse native distribution and at least 35-fold variation in genome size (e.g. rice = 420 Mb; wheat = 16,000 Mb). Amongst cereals, wheat (Triticum sp.) is the largest cultivated crop (210 million hectares (m ha)) produced in a broad-spectrum climatic environments and geographic regions.