The Open Wild Wheat Consortium Phase II began in January of 2022.
We are expanding the previous Ae. tauschii OWWC panel of 242 non-redundant accessions to over 600 accessions from Lineages 1, 2, and 3, constituting one of the largest collections of this wild wheat species.
Whole genome shotgun (WGS) sequencing between 7.5 and 10-fold coverage of the additional accessions will be carried out to generate an extensive sequence-configured panel for this wild wheat.

Credits: Jing Lu
The hallmark of the OWWC Phase II will be the creation of an Aegilops tauschii pangenome resource.
The pangenome will be generated from high-quality reference assemblies for a collection of 44 accessions. These accessions are strategically important to the consortium, as well as representative of the genetic diversity across the previously genotyped panel in Phase I.

The Research Team
- Ahmed Elkot, Agricultural Research Center, Egypt
- Ali Mehrabi, Research Institute of Forests and Rangelands, Iran
- Amir Sharon, Tel Aviv University, Israel
- Andrea Gonzalez, The Wulff Lab, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
- Awais Rasheed, Quaid-i-Azam University, Pakistan
- Brande Wulff, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
- Brian Steffenson, University of Minnesota, USA
- Dengcai Liu, Sichuan Agricultural University, Chengdu, China
- Dragan Perovic, Julius Kühn-Institut, Germany
- Firuza Nasyrova, National Academy of Sciences of Tajikistan, Tajikistan
- Gurcharn Brar, University of British Columbia, Canada
- Jan Dvorak, University of California Davis, USA
- Jesse Poland, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
- Jochen Cristoph Reif, Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK) Gatersleben, Germany
- Jon Raupp, Kansas State University, USA
- Jong-Yeol Lee, National Institute of Agricultural Science, Republic of Korea
- Long Mao, Institute of Crop Science, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, China
- Luke Dunning, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom
- Martin Mascher, Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK) Gatersleben, Germany
- Mehraj Abbasov, Genetic Resources Institute of Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences, Azerbaijan
- Nils Stein, Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK) Gatersleben, Germany
- Noam Chayut, Germplasm Resource Unit, John Innes Centre, United Kingdom
- Parveen Chhuneja, Punjab Agricultural University, India
- Peng Zhang, University of Sydney, Australia
- Robert Park, University of Sydney, Australia
- Samira Rustamova, Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences, Azerbaijan
- Sanzhen Liu, Kansas State University, USA
- Simon Krattinger, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
- Steven Xu, USDA-Agricultural Research Service, USA
- Surbhi Grewal, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom
- Vijay K Tiwari, University of Maryland, USA
- Wanlong Li, South Dakota State University, USA
- Xiangyang Xu, USDA-Agricultural Research Service, USA
- Yong Gu, USDA-Agricultural Research Service, USA
Data utilization
The raw data generated in Phase II will be made available under Toronto agreement.
By using the data you will agree to:
- Respect the rights of the data producers and contributors to analyze and publish the first global analyses and certain other reserved analyses of this data set in a peer-reviewed publication
- Not redistribute, release, or otherwise provide access to the data to anyone outside of the group, until the data has been published and submitted to the public data repositories
- Contact the authors to discuss any plans to publish data or analyses that utilize this data to avoid the overlap of any planned analyses
- Fully cite the pre-publication data along with any applicable versioning details
- Understand that this data as accessed is pre-competitive and is not patentable in its present state
This agreement does not expire by time but only upon publication of the first global analysis for the OWWC Phase II by the data producers and contributors.