Wheat is one of the major agricultural crop species in the world. It is grown throughout the world and contributes substantially to the human diet. Common or bread wheat, Triticum aestivum, is hexaploid with a large genome estimated at ~17,000 Mb that is attributable to the polyploidy nature of wheat and the high content of repetitive elements within the wheat genome. A number of genomic resources have been developed or are being developed for wheat. These include a collection of >500,000 wheat ESTs, bacterial artificial chromosome clones, and >5,000 bin-mapped EST markers.

We are developing a bioinformatics resource for annotating the wheat genome. We have centralized through this web site all available wheat sequence data and provided a series of access tools for analyzing wheat genomic data. We have also developed a wheat genome annotation pipeline and annotated publicly available wheat genome sequence for genes. As wheat is a member of the Poaceae family, it shares substantial gene similarity and synteny with other cereal species such as maize, barley, sorghum and rice. Consequently, syntenic maps using the near-complete rice genome and wheat genetic markers have been developed and links to these resources are available through this site.

It is our intent to provide in this website an integrated resource for wheat genome sequence and annotation and to provide ample tools for wheat biologists to leverage in their research programs.

All comments/questions can be sent to wheat@tigr.org.