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With the completion of IWGSC RefSeq v1.0 in 2018, the Consortium has moved into Phase II and focuses its efforts on the following projects:

1. IWGSC Diversity project to characterize the breadth of worldwide wheat diversity by de novo sequencing and assembly of at least eight landraces at high quality to obtain ancient wheat haplotypes and sequence multiple landraces and elite varieties at lower quality to capture modern genetic diversity, including alien introgressions.
2. IWGSC Wheat Genome Annotation project to identify and assign positions in the Chinese Spring reference bread wheat sequence to important features, including genes, splice variants, pseudogenes, transposable elements, small RNAs and regulatory elements.
3. IWGSC Reference Wheat Genome project to produce a Gold Standard reference genome sequence of the bread wheat genome cv. Chinese Spring.
4. Development of Genomics Tools for the community through collaborations with services providers.

With these activities, the IWGSC will reach beyond the reference sequence to provide breeders and the broader scientific community with a full genome-sequence based tool box for wheat improvement.