Cereal genomics: Excitements, challenges and opportunities

Abstract

Cereals constitute the most important food crops of the world, occupying ~680 million hectares of land and producing ~2,295 million tonnes of food grain globally (October 4, 2012; http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/wfs-home/csdb/en/), even though this production is lower than that for the year 2011 (2,340 million tonnes).