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The IWGSC led the effort to develop a high quality, reference sequence of the large, complex (hexaploid), bread wheat genome (IWGSC RefSeq v1.0). This year's workshop will include a presentation of a proposed finishing strategy for the genome and one on a new pipeline for wheat and barley sequences that may facilitate the development of the complete wheat pan-genome, both key objectives of IWGSC phase II. With IWGSC RefSeq v1.0 and annotation versions 1.0 and 1.1 available to scientists, significant advances in wheat genomics have been made and the workshop will include talks that highlight some of these. As usual, the workshop also will include a talk by an IWGSC Early Career Award recipient. This is given to a young scientist nominated by anyone in the wheat community and selected by the IWGSC leadership in recognition of outstanding achievement.

The workshop examined advances in functional annotation of regions in the reference genome sequence regions which will include gap closure and finishing the genome sequence as well as the functional annotation of the gene space. Generally the regions examined will be in agronomically important regions and we would expect new bioinformatics developments to accelerate the integration of multiple data sets. The IWGSC phase II strategy, post the release of the wheat reference genome (IWGSC RefSeq v1.0), includes developing a pipeline for community generated manual annotation coupled, functional annotation, and annual annotation releases by the IWGSC. The workshop focused on genome-level studies to facilitate manual and functional annotation, the process of manual annotation, and platforms for annotation and visualization.

The IWGSC Business meeting took place on Saturday 12 January from 6:20 to 8:30pm in Pacific Salon 4-5.

Poster presented by the IWGSC at The Plant and Animal Genome XXVII Conference (12-16 January 2019 - San Diego, CA, USA)

The IWGSC organized two workshops and held a business meeting at the 2019 PAG Conference in San Diego.