Meeting Report of the 11th International Wheat Genetics Symposium

Yasunari Ogihara

Kihara Institute for Biological Research, Yokohama City University, Yokohama 244-0813, Japan

Corresponding author: Yasunari Ogihara

Kihara Institute for Biological Research, Yokohama City University, Yokohama 244-0813, Japan

E-mail: yogihara@yokohama-cu.ac.jp

The 11th International Wheat Genetics Symposium (IWGS) was held during 24th and 29th of August, 2008 in Brisbane Convention Centre, Brisbane, Australia.  About 400 wheat researchers and/or breeders got together in the third largest city of Australia.  Forty attendants were from Japan.  This is the second most attendants, and the Australians were the first (158 people).  On the demands of Australian breeders, issues on wheat breeding, especially tolerance or resistance against biotic as well as abiotic stresses were main topics.  The symposium put weight on the application field.  While, reflecting recent innovations of genomics in wheat, genomics section was set up.  The wheat genetics and breeding are coming of new era, so called genome breeding.  However, polyploidy is a great wall to carry out genome breeding.  Another barrier is huge genome size of wheat, in which repetitive sequences disturb genome research for wheat genetics and breeding.  Nevertheless, genome sequencing of chromosome 3B has been started as a model case.  Tools for functional genomics have also developed in wheat.  These useful tools must bring us new insights of wheat genetics and breeding.

In the business session, Yokohama, Japan had been selected as the site of the 12th IWGS.  We, the local organizing committee, are planning to have an up-to-date symposium, and looking forward to having many attendants in Yokohama.