About 20% of the calories and protein consumed by humans comes from wheat. It was not always like that as it started around 10,000 years ago when prehistoric humans have begun to cultivate wild emmer wheat. This process, known as domestication, changed our history because it enabled humanity to establish settled agrarian societies. Domestication also changed wheat genetics and eventually turned it into our modern wheat varieties. When and how did modern wheat lose beneficial traits (e.g. drought tolerance, disease resistance) common in wild emmer wheat? Can we use this wild plant material to strengthen our modern wheat and secure food supply? The answers to these
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questions are written in the wheat DNA. Since the discovery of the wild wheat ancestor in 1906 by Aharon Aaronsohn in Rosh-Pina Israel, there was a continuous effort to introduce beneficial traits from wild emmer to modern wheat. Yet, the lack of a full genome map of wheat has slowed down this process dramatically. An international consortium was recently established to decode the wild wheat DNA. Wild wheat genome sequence will advance wheat research and facilitate modern wheat improvement that is a critical necessity in face of the ever growing human population and global climate changes.
The Zavitan genome was published in Science, July 2017
"Wild emmer genome architecture and diversity elucidate wheat evolution and domestication"
To read more: Avni et al. 2017
