Significant Work Still Needed to Really Crack Wheats Genetic Code

WASHINGTON 30 August 2010, 10:00 am EDT. The International Wheat Genome Sequence Consortium (IWGSC – www.wheatgenome.org), an international Consortium of wheat growers, public and private breeders and scientists, strongly disagrees with implications that the sequence reads made available by a UK team, led by Professor Neil Hall, represent in any way the sequence of the wheat genome or that this work is comparable to genome sequences for rice, maize, or soybean.
An Associated Press (AP) story published on 27 August 2010, in London, entitled “Scientists: Weve cracked wheats genetic code”, reports that Neil Halls team has “decoded the genetic sequence of wheat” and implies that this information is equivalent to the genome sequences available for the rice, maize, soybean, and the human genomes.
The AP story and the claims in that story by Neil Hall are in direct conflict with the BBSRC announcement released the same day and are a complete misrepresentation of the value of the work to breeders and scientists. Regrettably, the AP story and its headline that the wheat genome has been sequenced has been repeated in stories by all major media outlets around the world. As correctly stated by the agency that funded the research, the BBSRC, (http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/media/releases/2010/100827-pr-uk-researchers-draft-wheat-genome.aspx), “this is an important step but significant work remains to be done to achieve a complete genome sequence” and the “full sequenced genome requires further read-throughs, assembly of the data into chromosomes and significant work to fully annotate the sequence data”.
The IWGSC appreciates the timely release of the 5X sequence coverage of the wheat genome and believes that these raw sequences complement previous EST approaches to collect information about genes and will be a very useful for future high throughput marker development. However, this sequence information cannot be considered as a wheat genome sequence comparable to those produced for other crops in which the sequences are ordered, annotated, and aligned in such a way that the position of the genes along the chromosomes is known. This ordering and alignment is essential for linking the genetic information to the agronomically important traits that the breeders are targeting for improving wheat varieties. The raw sequence reads produced by the UK team could be viewed as similar to having an unordered string of all of the letters from a set of encyclopedia volumes and it is clear that significant additional resources and effort, by far exceeding those invested to achieve the 5X coverage, will be needed over the next few years to obtain a wheat genome sequence.
The IWGSC concurs wholeheartedly with the statement that the complete genome sequence of wheat will usher in a new era of wheat improvement. And, we agree with the press comments that the complete sequence will be a “scientific tour de force” that will be “the most significant breakthrough in wheat production in 10,000 years”. Unfortunately, however, this is far from being the case at present and this premature claim is jeopardizing the ongoing international efforts to truly achieve a genome sequence with high utility for wheat in the next five years. The IWGSC remains committed to continuing our collaborative, international effort and look forward to the day when we can indeed announce that the “wheat genetic code has been cracked”.
The International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium