The yield of mapped reads was comparable to that of a study where wheat flow-sorted chromosome arms were sequenced [ 21].
The analysis and sorting are carried out at rates of 10 10 chromosomes per second, and for complex genomes such as wheat the flow sorting technology has been ground-breaking in reducing genome complexity for genome sequencing.
The new, serene Ariel Sharon who lumbers through flowing wheat fields in campaign commercials is a far cry from the feisty warrior who has been fighting one battle or another since he was wounded during Israel's war of independence in 1948-49.
For the first time, an arm of an Aegilops chromosome from the tertiary gene pool of wheat was successfully flow-sorted and sequenced by Illumina technology.
As pollen-mediated gene flow from wheat is expected to be more important along wheat fields than in remote locations (i.e. 20 30 m pollen is a commonly reported range for pollen movements, Matus-Cadiz et al. 2004; Hanson et al. 2005; Loureiro et al. 2007b), this observation is not surprising and indicates that wheat to Aegilops gene flow might be a local-scale phenomenon.
Tracking the flow of wheat gluten around the world, much less evaluating its quality, is like trying to contain a drop of dye in a churning whirlpool.
With this combined approach, we detected substantial gene flow between wheat and Aegilops species.
Diversity contributed by gene flow into wheat was further shaped by several factors.
For instance, Weissmann et al. (2005) reported traces of ancient gene flow from wheat in individuals of Ae. peregrina collected in fields abandoned for more than 30 years.
Our approach revealed only limited gene flow from wheat to Ae. geniculata, while Ae. neglecta and Ae. triuncialis showed substantial evidence of introgression (Fig. 1).
In practical terms, these results outline gene flow from wheat to Aegilops as a potential issue that has to be explicitly addressed during risk assessment studies associated with the release of genetically modified wheat cultivars.
