Wheat and Civilization

Wheat helped create [civilization:organisation] in the Middle East. It's a staple crop for 30 percent of the world's population. And now, with the publication of four articles in the journal Science, we're close to a [detailed:total] understanding of the bread wheat genome. Wheat is tough to sequence. It's gone through multiple hybridizations, making its [genome:environment] five times larger than a human one. Plus there are many redundancies: more than 80 percent of the genome is made of repeated DNA sequences. So the typical whole-genome shotgun [approach:retreat] - breaking genomes into segments and then reassembling them - doesn't work for wheat.