Postscript

Kozo Nishikawa, Hisashi Tsujimoto and Tetsuo Sasakuma
Editors of Wheat Information Service

Highlights and prospects of wheat bioscience in relation to WIS: Wheat research has several important implications in our life: Firstly, wheat is the No.1 crop with respect to world production and consumption. It is cultivated on all continents in a wide-range of environments, from low to high latitude, in cool to hot climates, and in dry to wet fields. Wheat provides staple food for 60% of the world population, and about 30% of the total food calories. Wheat acreage is still increasing along with increased yield per unit area even in the 21st century. Meanwhile, the world is suffering from agro-environmental problems such as drought, salinity, and new types of pests.

Wheat is a good example of polyploid evolution in the plant kingdom, where more than half of seed plants are estimated to have evolved by polyploidy. The wheat complex, including wild relatives, is the first plant group, in which the evolutionary process through interspecific hybridization and polyploidization has been demonstrated. Also, the concept of "genome" and methodology of "genome analysis" originally were established in this plant group. The first complete list of genome formulae of Aegilops species was published in WIS No. 30 (1970). Discovery of the Ph gene in wheat is another example of prominent achievements in polyploid genetics, which was first reported in WIS No.5 (1957).

Wheat bioscience featured outstanding development of chromosome engineering, long before gene engineering emerged. It was made possible by the production of a variety of chromosome deletion, substitution, and addition lines as well as synthetic amphiploids and alloplasmic lines which have proved to be invaluable for studying gene location and function, chromosome evolution, and transfer of alien genetic factors to wheat. The wheat research community shares a huge store of genetic resources: wild species, landraces, breeding materials, mutants, near-isogenics, translocation lines, and recombinant inbreds, besides the stocks mentioned above. Those lines are our precious properties, most of which are not available for other crops, and will be useful for future work in wheat bioscience. We are obliged so much to our pioneers who devoted themselves to the development and maintenance of those stocks. OD
ne of the main functions of WIS was to provide information about those genetic resources to wheat researchers.

Another characteristics of the wheat research community is its population size. We estimate that there are more than 2,000 active wheat bioscientists, including breeders; this estimate is based on the number of WIS subscribers, which was 800 at the peak, and the largest entry number of 820 in the 9th International Wheat Genetics Symposium (IWGS) held in Beijing. Information accumulated by this large number of active researchers is found, for example, in the past proceedings of IWGS and, in part, in WIS No. 1-99. This is another important feature of our wheat community. In this respect, our special thanks are due to 26 scientists, including the late Hitoshi Kihara and Ernest R. Sears, who took the initiative in organizing IWGS and publishing WIS.