The Open Wild Wheat Consortium phase I was completed in 2021 with the publication of our research article in Nature Biotechnology.
The publication took five years in the making and gathered 78 co-authors from 38 institutions around the world.

We established a diverse panel of 242 inbred and genotypically non-redundant accessions of Aegilops tauschii from across its natural geographic range.
The Ae. tauschii panel includes 116 accessions from Lineage 1, 121 from Lineage 2, and 5 from Lineage 3, displaying extensive variation in morphological traits and disease resistance.

Output of OWWC Phase I

Seed for the OWWC diversity panel is publicly available in the Germplasm Resources Unit (GRU) of the John Innes Centre, UK.
– GRU Collection: Open Wild Wheat Consortium Ae. tauschii Diversity Panel

Gaurav et al. (2021) Population genomic analysis of Aegilops tauschii identifies targets for bread wheat improvement. Nature Biotechnology.
Delorean et al. (2021) High molecular weight glutenin gene diversity in Aegilops tauschii demonstrates unique origin of superior wheat quality. Communications Biology. 4, 1242.

Data generated by the OWWC and published in Gaurav et al. 2021 is available in public repositories as described here.
Scripts and pipelines for the bioinformatics analyses described in Gaurav et al. 2021 are available in the Github repository: wheatgenetics/owwc.

How bread wheat got its gluten: Tracing the impact of a long-lost relative on modern bread wheat – Press release by JIC Communications (Nov 2021)
2020 BGRI Virtual Technical Workshop:
Exploiting diversity in the bread wheat D-genome progenitor. Presented by Kumar Gaurav. (Oct 2020)
New genomic tool searches wheat’s wild past to improve crops of the future –Press release by JIC Communications (Apr 2018)
The Research Team
- Ali Mehrabi, Ilam University, Iran
- Alison Bentley, National Institute of Agricultural Botany, UK
- Amir Sharon, Institute of Cereal Crop Improvement, Israel
- Beat Keller, University of Zurich, Switzerland
- Brande Wulff, John Innes Centre, UK
- Brian Steffenson, University of Minnesota, USA
- Burkhard Steuernagel, John Innes Centre, UK
- Carolina Paola Sansaloni, CIMMYT, Mexico
- Dengcai Liu, Sichuan Agricultural University, Chengdu, China
- Evans Lagudah, CSIRO, Australia
- Firuza Nasyrova, Academy of Sciences, Tajikistan
- Gina Brown-Guedira, USDA, USA
- Hanan Sela, Institute of Cereal Crop Improvement, Israel
- Jan Dvorak, UC Davis, USA
- Jesse Poland, Kansas State University, USA
- Klaus Mayer, Helmholtz Zentrum München, Germany
- Ksenia Krasileva, Earlham Institute, UK
- Kumar Guarav, John Innes Centre, UK
- Long Mao, Institute of Crop Science, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, China
- Mario Caccamo, National Institute of Agricultural Botany, UK
- Martin Mascher, IPK Gatersleben, Germany
- Mingcheng Luo, UC Davis, USA
- Parveen Chhuneja, Punjab Agricultural University, India
- Rob Davey, Earlham Institute, UK
- Justin Faris, USDA-Agricultural Research Service, USA
- Paul Nicholson, John Innes Centre, UK
- Noam Chayut, Germplasm Resource Unit, John Innes Centre, UK
- Mike Ambrose, Germplasm Resource Unit, John Innes Centre, UK
- Nidhi Rawat, University of Maryland, USA
- Vijay K Tiwari, University of Maryland, USA
Sponsors