Durum wheat genomics comes of age

Abstract

The past two decades have witnessed remarkable progress in developing and deploying plant genomics platforms to identify agronomically valuable loci and, ultimately, enhance crop performance. Accordingly, the articles of this special issue provide a timely update, certainly not exhaustive, on the latest developments in durum wheat genomics and its applications toward the improvement of this valuable crop, a staple food for several hundred million people worldwide. The growing interest in durum wheat is witnessed by a number of international initiatives that focus on this crop and also by the publication earlier this year of another special issue on durum wheat (Able and Atienza 2014) that covers a broad range of disciplines other than genomics and breeding.Although genome complexity and polyploidy have hindered the development of genomics platforms in both durum and bread wheat, the recent release of high-quality sequence information from hexaploid wheat (Choulet et al. 2014) coupled w ...