Wheat genome information

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

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

Genome browsers
GBrowse viewers for the UWA wheat pangenome v1.0 and the chromosome group 7 assemblies.
Data downloads
Assemblies, SNPs, genes, proteins and presence/absence data, with md5 checksums.
Wheat Panache
Gene presence/absence across 16 bread wheat genomes in an interactive pangenome graph.
Analysis tools
BLAST against the wheat assemblies, CropSNPdb array genotypes and the wheat autoSNPdb.
Other wheat resources
Links to the current reference genome, pangenome projects and community databases.

WheatGenome.info is actively maintained and updated as new wheat genomic data becomes available. It brings together data and tools from the University of Western Australia, our collaborators and the wider wheat research community. For the IWGSC reference genome and other community databases, see the resources page.