Wild emmer wheat genome sequencing project

Wheat (Triticum spp.) is one of the founder crops that drove the Neolithic transition from hunter-gatherer to sedentary agrarian societies in the Fertile Crescent over 10,000 years ago. Identifying the suite of genetic modifications underlying wheat's domestication requires knowledge of the genome of its allotetraploid progenitor, wild emmer (T. turgidum ssp. dicoccoides). Here we report a 10.1-gigabase assembly of the 14 chromosomes of wild tetraploid wheat.