On Nov. 28, 2012, scientists from the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS), as part of an international team, announced they had completed a shotgun sequencing of the wheat genome.

The achievement was expected to increase wheat yields, help feed the world and speed up development of wheat varieties with enhanced nutritional value. Wheat is one of the world’s “big three” crops, along with rice and corn, upon which the world’s growing population depends for nutrition.

Sequencing the genome of wheat was unusually daunting because the wheat genome is five times the size of the human genome, and has 94,000 to 96,000 genes.  This sequencing effort involved the identification of essentially all of those genes and mapping their relationship to other genes. The study was published in the journal Nature.