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PRESS RELEASE
The International Wheat Genome Sequence Consortium (IWGSC – www.wheatgenome.org), an international consortium of wheat growers, public and private breeders and scientists, strongly disagrees with implications that the sequence reads made available by a UK team, led by Professor Neil Hall, represent in any way the sequence of the wheat genome or that this work is comparable to genome sequences for rice, maize, or soybean.
An Associated Press (AP) story published on 27 August 2010, in London, entitled “Scientists: We've cracked wheat's genetic code”, reports that Neil Hall’s team has “decoded the genetic sequence of wheat” and implies that this information is equivalent to the genome sequences available for the rice, maize, soybean, and the human genomes.
The AP story and the claims in that story by Neil Hall are in direct conflict with the BBSRC announcement released the same day and are a complete misrepresentation of the value of the work to breeders and scientists. Regrettably, the AP story and its headline that the wheat genome has been sequenced has been repeated in stories by all major media outlets around the world. As correctly stated by the agency that funded the research, the BBSRC, (http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/media/releases/2010/100827-pr-uk-researchers-draft-wheat-genome.aspx), “this is an important step but significant work remains to be done to achieve a complete genome sequence” and the “full sequenced genome requires further read-throughs, assembly of the data into chromosomes and significant work to fully annotate the sequence data”.
The IWGSC appreciates the timely release of the 5X sequence coverage of the wheat genome and believes that these raw sequences complement previous EST approaches to collect information about genes and will be a very useful for future high throughput marker development. However, this sequence information cannot be considered as a wheat genome sequence comparable to those produced for other crops in which the sequences are ordered, annotated, and aligned in such a way that the position of the genes along the chromosomes is known. This ordering and alignment is essential for linking the genetic information to the agronomically important traits that the breeders are targeting for improving wheat varieties. The raw sequence reads produced by the UK team could be viewed as similar to having an unordered string of all of the letters from a set of encyclopedia volumes and it is clear that significant additional resources and effort, by far exceeding those invested to achieve the 5X coverage, will be needed over the next few years to obtain a wheat genome sequence.
The IWGSC concurs wholeheartedly with the statement that the complete genome sequence of wheat will usher in a new era of wheat improvement. And, we agree with the press comments that the complete sequence will be a “scientific tour de force” that will be “the most significant breakthrough in wheat production in 10,000 years”. Unfortunately, however, this is far from being the case at present and this premature claim is jeopardizing the ongoing international efforts to truly achieve a genome sequence with high utility for wheat in the next five years. The IWGSC remains committed to continuing our collaborative, international effort and look forward to the day when we can indeed announce that the “wheat genetic code has been cracked”.

The International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium
Eduard Akhunov, Kansas State University, USA
Rudi Appels, IWGSC co-chair, Murdoch University, Australia
Olin Anderson; UC Davis, USA
Harindra Singh Balyan, Chaudhary Charan Singh University, India
Faouzi Bekkaoui, National Research Council, Canada
Hélène Berges, CNRGV, France
Hikmet Budak, Sabanci University, Turkey
Luigi Cattivelli, CRA - Genomic Research Centre, Italy
Ravindra Chibbar, University of Saskatchewan, Canada
Frédéric Choulet, INRA, France
Forrest Chumley, Heartland Plant Innovations, USA
Jaroslav Dolezel, Institute of Experimental Botany, Czech Republic
Renato D’Ovidio, University of Tuscia, Italy
Kellye Eversole, executive director, IWGSC, USA
Tzion Fahima, University of Haifa, Israel
Catherine Feuillet, IWGSC co-chair and coordinator of the EU FP7 TriticeaeGenome Project, INRA, France
Delphine Fleury, ACPFG, Australia
Patrizia Galeffi, ENEA, Italy
Bikram Gill, IWGSC co-chair, Kansas State University, USA
Laurent Guerreiro, ARVALIS, France
Pushpendra Gupta, Chaudhary Charan Singh University, India
Hirokazu Handa, National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences, Japan
Pilar Hernandez, Instituto de Agricultura Sostenible, IAS (CSIC), Spain
Beat Keller, IWGSC co-chair, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Benjamin Killian, IPK-Gatersleben, Germany
Nikolay Kolchanov, Institute Cytology & Genetics, Russian Federation
Abraham Korol, University of Haifa, Israel
Evans Laguda, CSIRO, Australia
Peter Langridge, ACPFG, Australia
Philippe Leroy, INRA, France
Hélène Lucas, Genetics and Plant Breeding Department, INRA, France
Sergio Lucretti, ENEA CR Casaccia, Italy
Miloudi Nachit, ICARDA, Syrian Arab Republic
Yasunari Ogihara, IWGSC co-chair, Kihara Institute for Biological Research, Yokohama City University, Japan
Odd-Arne Olsen, Norwegian University of Life Sciences and Hedmark University College, Norway
Hakan Özkan, University Of Cukurova, Turkey
Etienne Paux, INRA, France
Sébastien Praud, Biogemma, France
Cyrille Saintenac, Kansas State University, USA
Elena Salina, Institute Cytology & Genetics, Russian Federation
Takuji Sasaki, Vice president NIAS, Japan
Kuldeep Singh, Punjab Agricultural University, India
Pierre Sourdille, INRA, France
Wolfgang Spielmeyer, CSIRO Plant Industry, Australia
Nils Stein, IPK-Gatersleben, Germany
Mark Sorrels, Cornell University, USA
Song Weining, Northwest A&F University, China
Roberto Tuberosa, Universita de Bologna, Italy
Hu Yingang, Norwest A&F University, China
Institutions:
Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics (ACPFG), Australia
Biogemma, France
Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA), France
Institute Cytology & Genetics, Russian Federation
Sabanci University, Turkey
University of Haifa, Israel