Cereal Genomics: An Overview

Cereals are widely cultivated and produce annually, 1800 to 1900 million tonnes of food grains worldwide (see Table 1; FAO- website http://apps.fao.org). Cereals also represent 60% of the calories and proteins consumed by human beings. They include a variety of crops including rice, maize, wheat, oats, barley, rye, etc., but excluding millets like pearl millet and other minor millets. In the past, cereals have been a subject of intensive cytogenetic investigations that are now extended further in the genomics era using powerful tools of molecular biology. The progress in cereal genomics research during the last two decades, involving the use of molecular markers for a variety of purposes, and the whole genome sequencing in rice has been remarkable indeed. The results of genomics research resolved many aspects, which the conventional cytogenetics failed to resolve. For instance, this involved initially the preparation of molecular maps, which were utilized extensively for...