Norwich, United Kingdom
June 26, 2013
An exciting “Triticeae” (wheat) Genomics workshop was held at The Genome Analysis Centre (TGAC) today. This event gave TGAC scientists and researchers involved in unraveling the secrets of a group of plant genomes that includes wheat, rye and barley the opportunity to share their progress and achievements.
Opened by Dr Mario Caccamo, TGAC's acting director, the talks and resulting discussions highlighted how TGAC is able to provide information at all stages from discovering, gathering and interpreting vast amounts of data to developing biological applications that contribute to science and agriculture. The impact of the wheat genomics and bioinformatics research at TGAC promises to have a significant impact far beyond Norwich in terms of food sustainability and biotechnology.
The workshop saw the contribution of several researchers involved on a variety of aspects in wheat genomics and bioinformatics challenges: including an historical retrospective on the wheat and the “green revolution” by Dr Mario Caccamo; an overview of k-mer and their significance in the field from Bernardo Clavijo; followed by two more talks about Durum WGS and contig classification from Dr John Wright and simulating mate pair read data using a wheat chromosome 3B Assembly by Dr Paul Bailey.
After the coffee break the workshop provided four contributions related to the technological sequencing developments by Dr Matt Clark on High Throughput BAC-by-BAC sequencing and Dharanya Sampath on Exome sequencing to variant discovery in Barley. The final two talks introduced the work from Ricardo Ramirez-Gonzalez on Candidate SNP detection in bulks and Dr Simon Moxon on the Wheat PH1 locus.
The workshop was also pragmatically useful in terms of sparking the discussion around common pitfalls and shortcomings on High Throughput data production and analysis as well as pinpointing main challenges and ways to approach these and move forwards.
“This is the moment to capitalise recent advances in genomics and bioinformatics to bring sustainability and crop improvements to Triticeae research,” said Dr Mario Caccamo.
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