Full wheat genome within reach, at little cost

PARIS - The head of a body set up by the G20 economic powers to help avert food crises urged governments on Tuesday to fund a map of wheat's unusually complex genetic code to help boost crop yields and feed growing world demand.

Five times bigger than the human genome, the mysteries of the world's most widely sown crop could be fully sequenced by late 2016 with financing of just $20 million, said Helene Lucas, coordinator of the Wheat Initiative, which meets in Paris on Wednesday to discuss the plan to counter stagnant wheat yields.

"We have reached a plateau in output, we now have to make a further step to produce more, produce better, by using all the tools available to us," Lucas, a scientist at France's National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA), told Reuters.

"If we pool our financing now we can achieve a high-quality sequencing at the end of 2016 that will be available to everyone," she said in an interview, noting that this would mean her international agency's 14 state-funded members putting up a modest $1.4 million each over three years. "That's peanuts."

Flagging growth in harvest yields of wheat has raised concern countries will not be able to achieve the 60-percent rise in output by 2050 that the United Nations says is needed to meet rising demand from a growing population and a shift in appetites toward Western-style bread, cakes and biscuits.

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Full wheat genome within reach, at little cost