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The IWGSC uses a milestone-based, adaptable strategy that ensures the immediate availability of significant outputs for wheat breeders and the wheat industry at large in parallel to continued advancements in basic research on the wheat genome.

The four key milestones of the IWGSC roadmap

1. Use of survey sequences of the 21 bread wheat chromosomes to assign gene sequences to individual chromosomes;
2. Develop physical maps to provide resources for sequencing;
3. Deliver a reference sequence for each of the chromosomes; and
4. Produce a gold standard genome sequence by integrating chromosome based genomic resources with the IWGSC whole genome assembly.

Key milestones deliveries

• July 2014 – Milestone 1 – Publication of the chromosome-based draft genome sequence in the journal Science
• December 2015 – Milestone 2 – Physical maps for all chromosomes completed.
• January 2016 – A whole genome shotgun assembly (IWGSC WGA v0.4) generated a reference sequence for each chromosome.
• January 2017 – IWGSC RefSeq v 1.0, the annotated, high quality reference sequence is made available pre-publication.
• August 2018 – Milestone 3 – A detailed description and an analysis of the reference sequence of the bread wheat genome (IWGSC RefSeq v 1.0) is published in Science.
• April 2021 – Version 2.1 of the reference sequence of bread wheat, IWGSC RefSeq v2.1., and IWGSC Annotation v2.1 are publicly available.
• The sequence is currently further improved to deliver milestone 4.