An interview of Rudi Appels by Stephen Baenziger

Well known in the IWGSC as he has been at the heart and soul of the consortium since its inception in 2005, Rudi Appels is Honorary Professor at the University of Melbourne and Research Fellow at AgriBio (Latrobe University), both in Melbourne, Australia.

“I have often been asked what the secrets are to our success and one of those is having leaders who are not merely interested in advancing their own career but interested in achieving a broader vision. Rudi epitomizes this kind of leader,” said Kellye Eversole, Executive Director of the IWGSC.

Rudi Appels and Stephen Baenziger (University of Nebraska Lincoln, USA) have known each other for more than two decades. Read the interview here .

28 October - Interaction between wheat cis- and trans-factors in shaping regulatory networks

18 November - Challenges and opportunities in positional cloning and structural variation in polyploid crops

15 December - Developing sustainable strategies to protect wheat roots from take-all disease

21 October 2021 - CIMMYT joins the IWGSC

The IWGSC is pleased to announce that CIMMYT has joined the organization as a sponsoring partner.

The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, CIMMYT, is a non-profit international agricultural research and training organization focusing on two of the world’s most important cereal grains: maize and wheat, and related cropping systems and livelihoods.

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BASF has been supporting the IWGSC since 2019 and we are proud to count this innovative company as our sponsor. The IWGSC has been working with the BASF (and predecessor company) team in Ghent, Belgium, since 2011. They have played a critical role as leaders and collaborators in all the consortium’s activities.

Read the interview with John Jacobs , BASF representative in the IWGSC Coordinating Committee.

27 April 2021 - IWGSC RefSeq v2.1 Assembly and Annotation now freely available at URGI

Version 2.1 of the reference sequence of bread wheat, IWGSC RefSeq v2.1, and IWGSC Annotation v2.1 are now available at the IWGSC data repository hosted by URGI-INRAE

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On 17 August 2018, the IWGSC published in the international journal Science a detailed description and an analysis of the reference sequence of the bread wheat genome, the world’s most widely cultivated crop.

This work will pave the way for the production of wheat varieties better adapted to climate challenges, with higher yields, enhanced nutritional quality and improved sustainability.

The research article – authored by more than 200 scientists from 73 research institutions in 20 countries – presents the DNA sequence of the bread wheat variety Chinese Spring ordered along the 21 wheat chromosomes. It is the highest quality genome sequence produced to date for wheat.

Read the IWGSC press release and the information package about the publication (Q&A, quotes, media kit, and more).

Watch this explainer video and this interview video to learn more about the IWGSC reference sequence of bread wheat.