Fact Sheets & Infographics

Wheat is the number one food crop consumed in the world, and the main source of calories and proteins in human diets.

The availability of a reference genome for a crop helps plant breeders to speed up the development of new improved varieties.

The bread wheat genome is both extremely large and complex. It is more than five times larger than the human genome and comprises 21 chromosomes originating from three individual subgenomes with highly similar gene contents.

Today's bread wheat originates from three ancestral grass species and results from two consecutive hybridizations

Wheat is the most widely grown cereal crop in the world, with 730 millions tons produced on 222 million hectares (2014 data). Each year, nearly US $50 billion-worth of wheat is traded globally. The world’s top producers are the European Union, followed by China, India and the USA. Wheat is currently the staple food for more than 35% of the global human population. With the world’s population estimated to reach 9.6 billion by 2050, the World Bank has estimated that global wheat production would need to increase by 60 %.

The European Union is the world’s leading wheat producer, ahead of China, India and the USA, with 20% of the total world harvest (149 million tons in 2014) on 24.4 million ha cultivated.

To sequence the large bread wheat genome, the IWGSC uses a chromosome-by-chromosome approach based on physical maps. This strategy efficiently delivers a high-quality, ordered sequence comparable to the gold standard reference sequence of rice.

Chromosomes are the basic materials used to sequence the bread wheat genome, which has 21 pairs of chromosomes. How can they be separated?