Periods of drought have always existed. In recent years, however, they have been much more extreme than before, both in Germany and worldwide. Researchers expect this trend to continue. One reason for this is climate change.
Bread for the world Bread for the world
An international research team has succeeded in decoding the genetic makeup of wheat. This opens up great opportunities for nutrition and health: New wheat varieties can feed more people worldwide - and the genome helps to better understand allergies and intolerances.
Together with rice, corn and soybeans, wheat is responsible for about 60 percent of the food consumed by people around the globe - primarily as bread, but also as pasta or even beer. For a long time, however, it was far less well known how the wheat genome is structured. It took more than 13 years for over 200 scientists from more than 20 countries worldwide to decode the genome of this cereal in one of the largest projects in plant research, the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium (IWGSC).