IWGSC Newsletter – January to March 2017

The IWGSC

• Membership: the IWGSC has 1500 members, working in 469 institutes/companies in 60 countries. Check out the map .

• Sponsors: the IWGSC has 17 sponsors . Sponsor support is essential to ensuring continuation of activities. Please inform us if you know of any potential sponsors (research institutes, universities, governmental agencies, or companies).

Projects

• Since January and the release of IWGSC RefSeq v1.0 for download and BLAST at URGI, the RefSeq Analysis team has been working to produce an automated annotation of the sequence and to undertake analyses that will be described in the primary publication.

• Two gene annotation pipelines that were used previously to annotate, respectively, chromosome 3B (Triannot, INRA-GDEC, FR) and the IWGSC chromosome survey sequence (PGSB pipeline, Helmholtz Zentrum, DE), were used to annotate the gene content of Refseq v1. 0. The annotations were evaluated and integrated by the Earlham Institute (UK) to produce an annotation that combines the best models from each data set. The gene models have been given a confidence classification (high / low) based, principally, on protein homology and UTR extensions are being added where transcript support is available. The final set will provide the substrate for analysis of RNASeq data deposited with the Wheat Gene Expression Atlas .

• Pre-publication access to the annotation will be provided through URGI in accordance with the Toronto Agreement under which the IWGSC reserves the right to publish the first global analyses of the data. For specific access terms, see the IWGSC General Data Access agreement .

People

• Leader Spotlight: Hélène Bergès

• Early Career Award: Naeela Qureshi

• Leadership Awards:
  • Forrest Chumley
  • Rudi Appels
  • Beat Keller
  • Nils Stein
  • Martin Mascher, Frédéric Choulet and Gabriel Keeble-Gagnère

Meetings/Workshops

• 29-31 May, 2017, PAG Asia , Seoul, South Korea. The IWGSC will hold a workshop on Wednesday 31 March from 11:15 am to 1:00 pm in room grand Ballroom 3.
• 23-28 April 2017: members of the IWGSC will be present at the Wheat Genetics Symposium in Tulln, Austria. On Monday 24 April, (16h40 - 17h10), Rudi Appels will give the keynote address on “The wheat genome in the 21st century”.
• 14-18 January 2017: The IWGSC organized two workshops and a business meeting at PAG XXV , San Diego, USA
  • Main Workshop – Speaker profiles
  • Standards and Protocols Workshop
  • PAG pictures

Presentations

• 5 April 2017, Venturini presentation , Monogram meeting, Bristol, UK
• 4 April 2017, Olsen presentation , Monogram meeting, Bristol, UK
• 16 March 2017, Eversole presentation , Plant Genomics and Gene Editing Congress, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
• 14-18 January 2017: PAG presentations IWGSC Main Workshop – IWGSC Standards and Protocols workshop

Publications/resources

• New books: Achieving sustainable cultivation of wheat (Vol 1&2)
  • Two reference books on wheat, focused on ways to improve wheat cultivation at each step of the value chain, from breeding to post-harvest storage. Read more
  • IWGSC members get 20% off when ordering online with the code IWGSC20
    • Achieving sustainable cultivation of wheat, volume 1
    • Achieving sustainable cultivation of wheat, volume 2
• A note on sequence nomenclature : how to correctly refer to the IWGSC wheat genome assembly releases in presentations and documents;
• Glossary of terms used frequently in genome sequencing.
• Set of slides for members to use in their presentations – Updated April 2017

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