SEED BREEDING THINK PIECE
May 1st, 2003
BY ALAN OSBORNWHAT a complex and mysterious thing wheat is! Scientists tell us that modern wheat is a hexaploid, which means that the long-distant ancestors of wheat "hybridised in a way that combined three copies of the original genome to produce a genome with over 150,000 genes." Compare this to the human genome which has just 35,000 genes, or rice with 40,000, and you sense how remarkable wheat is.Is it important to know this? Yes. A study of genes is the first step towards understanding what it is they do in the plant and how they interact with other genes to ...
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