Wheat genome information

Genome browsers, sequence assemblies, SNPs and gene annotation for bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) from the Applied Bioinformatics group at the University of Western Australia.

Wheat field

Bread wheat and its genome

Wheat is one of the world's most important crops, and it has one of the most challenging genomes. Bread wheat is hexaploid: each cell carries three related sub-genomes, called A, B and D. Each sub-genome is about 5.5 billion base pairs, almost twice the size of the human genome, and around 80% of the sequence is repetitive.

For many years this made wheat very hard to sequence. A complete annotated reference genome for the cultivar Chinese Spring (IWGSC RefSeq v1.0) was published by the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium in 2018, and has since been updated. Research has now moved on to wheat pangenomes: the genes shared by all wheat varieties, and those present in only some of them.

What this site provides

The data here is from the UWA wheat projects (2012–2017) and is kept available for reproducibility and for anyone citing it. For the current wheat reference genome and annotation, see the resources page.