Fig. 1.

The advances in cereal genome sequencing provides the basis for the alignment of genomes and the identification of candidate genes underpinning significant agronomic traits. The alignment of the barley and D genome donor of wheat (Aegilops tauschii) genome sequences is based on the genes that are conserved between the species and illustrates the high degree of synteny between the barley and wheat genomes that can now be exploited for studying specific agronomic traits in detail. The image was kindly provided by M Pfeifer and K Mayer (MIPS, Helmholtz-Zentrum Munich, Germany), and for a more extensive comparison between the D genome and barley, see Brenchley et al. (2012) and Jia et al. (2013)