Wheat is grown on more than 215 million hectares of land worldwide, more than any other crop. It is the third most produced cereal ager maize (corn) and rice and the leading source of vegetable protein in human food.

Soon, researchers and farmers will have the tools they need to produce more food, with greater nutritional value, potentially using less water and fewer pesticides and herbicides. The genetic blueprint of wheat has been mapped for the first time. According to researchers, this means that the full wheat genome could be available within three years.

“The development of genome specific primers, which used to take several weeks of work, can now be done in hours. Mapping of any sequence to the specific chromosome arm can now be done in silico in minutes. In addition to the acceleration of day to day work in wheat genetics, this resource has made possible analyses and discoveries at the genome level that were not possible before,” said Jorge Dubcovsky, professor at the University of California Davis, in a statement.

The new research appears in the latest issue of the journal Science alongside another article which presents the first reference sequence for the largest chromosome, 3B.

“With the draft gene sequence for each of the bread wheat chromosome and the first reference sequence of chromosome 3B, we have reached a great milestone in our roadmap. We know now the way forward to obtain a reference sequence for the 20 remaining chromosomes and we hopefully will be able to find the resources to achieve this in the next three years,” said Catherine Feuillet, the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium co-chair.

With vast areas of farm land worldwide threatened by climate change, improving the yield and nutritional value of staple crops is increasingly important. According to researchers the new blueprint has already provided new insights into the evolution and history of wheat, as well as the genes involved in grain development.