Seems like many other dire circumstances would have to befall the earth before any of the global top 3 crops become extinct.

There are many, many varieties of wheat. They all need to preserved, because they have many different strengths/weaknesses.

Having a monoculture of crops is a terrible vulnerability. Look at what is happening with our current monoculture of bananas.

As a longtime celiac sufferer, it would be in my best interest and that of my descendants for all of those varieties to be eradicated, like smallpox. There’s nothing especially beneficial about wheat as a food, and it has drawbacks, such as how it is the only food I can think of with its own autoimmune disease.

I can't say I support your desire to eradicate wheat. I love bread, and without bread probably half the human population would starve. Most of the rest would likely die in the resulting upheaval.

There was a scifi story about such a scenario, I think it was entitled "No Blade of Grass" by John Christopher.

No, wheat is not crucial in a way that people would starve if it were not available. There are dozens of other foods that could be grown which would provide equivalent nutritional benefit. It is not a unique or particularly advantageous source of any nutrition. It does not have any unique advantageous growing properties.

Additionally, while many people are not familiar with cereal grains other than the close wheat family, there is really nothing that different about their flavor or how they taste in cooking. The only useful, unique thing about wheat is that the protein provides a texture in baked goods and sauces that people find pleasant. When forced to explore alternative grains for a couple of years, and having eaten my mothers alternative grain cooking before that, I learned that the gluten-free foods often actually taste better. Wheat is necessary and flavorful like Windows is user friendly and required for your computer to function.

If you put my comment in context, I am not intending to advocate any sort of eradication program for wheat. I’m responding with mild hyperbole to the notion that it is particularly critical to preserve wheat. The main idea that I am promoting here is that there’s nothing special about wheat, other than that it is particularly harmful to some people.

I like bread. I like wheat noodles.

As a child I was allergic to all dairy products with serious eczema from head to toe, even a drop of dairy would initiate it, entire body covered in scabs, arms in wet bandage inner-wrapping, dry outer bangage should I get exposed to even a little milk product. Yet I do not want all dairy products to be banned, they bring valuable nutrition to diverse groups of people, I was just unlucky, but very lucky to be born in a country with a health service that cares.

Wheat is a wonderful food, extremely nutritious, that has been the cornerstone of the development of multiple civilisations.

Why eradicate it? Just avoid it.

Wheat is not wonderfully nutritious. It provides nothing special and is even somewhat problematic.

If the global food industry was capable of keeping wheat out of their food, that would be fantastic. Unlike dairy, almost all dry foods are contaminated with gluten unless you go to lengths to obtain food that is not.

You're speaking from the perspective of someone who always has enough to eat, so you have the privilege of optimizing for nutrient ratios. Billions of other people aren't so lucky, and they just need more calories period. Wheat is great that, along with rice, soybeans, and other staple crops that are better in the growing/volume sense than in the nutritional sense. Not all of humanity can afford boutique heirloom artisanal hand-grown crops that are $10 per pound.

If we're going to optimize for anything, it's for feeding as many people as possible -- there are far fewer celiac sufferers than there are people who go without enough food. Optimizing the food chain to protect you would result in many more people dying from starvation, because you'd be eliminating an efficient, widely grown crop that feeds many. Wheat is the second most important crop in the world, behind only rice.

Actually, I’m speaking from the perspective of someone who is dying from starvation despite being surrounded by available food.

There is nothing special about wheat. All of the resources spent on growing wheat could be expended on many other crops which would provide equal or greater nutritional benefit. The reason wheat is a globally important crop is simply because people have made it that way for arbitrary reasons, like raising European cattle in North America.

I'd like to hear about a food that isn't in some way problematic, can you list any?

The problems I am referring to are celiac and non-celiac gluten sensitivity. There are at least a dozen other grains that provide the benefits of wheat without those disadvantages, and that is to what I am referring. Rice, corn, sorghum, buckwheat, millet, teff, quinoa, lentils, and and so on.

So the "even somewhat problematic" part of wheat is problematic to only 1% of the entire population and that's an argument to kill off all wheat, yeah, no, try again.

The article says wheat has 5x the human genome. I assume that means it’s very high in protein. Isn’t that what most of the world needs, as opposed to mostly carbohydrates?

High in protein compared to what? Is wheat better than millet, sorghum, quinoa, teff, oats, corn, and rice, or is it just a European tradition to base cuisine on wheat? I’m not an agricultural or genetic expert and I have no idea what relation genome complexity has to proteins or how that makes it useful to humans. Overall wheat is not very high in protein... it’s a crop grown for carbohydrates. If you were trying to fulfill your daily protein needs from wheat, you’d fall quite short. I suppose it complements more adequate sources. The protein it does have - gluten - isn’t especially digestible compared to alternatives like corn or rice, though it does have a texture that people find pleasant or useful in baking. Crops like lentils and soy are what you grow if you want to grow protein.

Wheat has a decent protein-to-carbohydrate ratio and you can make seitan from it, which is a great alternative to tofu / tempeh and other legume-based protein sources.

Sure, seitan (aka wheat gluten) is a protein source. How many other grains have a decent protein to carbohydrate ratio though, and are more easily digestible, and don’t cause crippling autoimmune disease or digestive dysfunction in 1-5% of people? You can get concentrated protein from any grain with similar nutritional benefits.

Personally, my sensitivity to gluten has just about ruined my life - right now, my life is on hold and I am staying in a hotel in Rochester while obtaining treatment from the Mayo Clinic’s celiac specialists. Not sure that anyone can say that about quinoa or millet.

no, it means nothing of that sort, it just means the DNA is five times longer, not that there are five time as many genes encoding five times as many proteins. It is more like there is more DNA padding around the genes as a protection from virus which tend to jump limited distances along a genome.

sorry for leading with a negative, I know it can come across more strongly than I intend.

There's a drastically cheaper option for that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_bank

e.g.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_bank

But less reliable. Wasn't one of the seed banks in the arctic destroyed by flooding recently?

Digital versions can be replicated and distributed at 0 cost.

Assuming you're referring to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the Wikipedia page answers your question:

> In October 2016, the seed vault experienced an unusually large degree of water intrusion due to higher than average temperatures and heavy rainfall .... The vault was designed for water intrusion and as such the seeds were not at risk.

The article's source: https://www.popsci.com/seed-vault-flooding

Thanks for the reference.

We should indeed continue with seed vaults. But I'd feel better with a backup for that in the form of digital data.

If things go far enough downhill that the Svalbard vault is lost and its contents just allowed to rot, I’d be surprised if we retained the technological capacity to do things like synthesizing a complex genome from data. (I’m not sure we could do that with present technology either, for that matter.)

Libraries and museums burn down all the time, or get destroyed in wars. Consider the recent fire at the Hewlett-Packard museum, where all the paper history was lost. Nobody made a backup, even though paper lasts longer term than data on a hard drive.

Frankly, I think storing data as ASCII in pits on a substrate is a great long term solution, as it can be read with a simple optical microscope, and ASCII is forever.

One of the cool things about digital data is it can be copied forward limitlessly. Make the seed genomes public domain and put them on a server - people will make copies, like they make copies of wikipedia to store in their prepper bunkers.

I think UTF-8 is fine in this case since it's ASCII until it's not so you can write the UTF-8 spec out first.

Human knowledge is more then English alphabet characters and not all concepts translate properly.

Even with the digital copy of the genome, you have to synthesize the entire genome, the cell it belongs in, and the rest of the seed to get a plant. That seems... possible, but hard enough that it doesn't make sense to call the sequenced genome a "backup".

It's infinitely better than having a photo of a wheat stalk.

Is it possible to recreate a wheat plant from just its genome?

No. You need a wheat cell as well. Then you might be in business.

And, no, it is not possible (today) to rebuild a multi gigabase hexaploid genome. The best that's been done so far is mycoplasma (500kb genome, which is many orders of magnitude smaller).

Also, the "genome sequence" presented here is not really complete. Thus far only the simplest organisms have had their genomes synthesized from a digital template and resulted in a viable cell. We rarely can produce a "complete" genome for anything other than bacteria and viruses. And for those, the diversity in the population makes the idea of establishing a single genome sequence somewhat limiting.

Today? No. Likely the so-called "junk DNA" was skipped over and we are still learning what the impact of environment and hormones is on gene expression.

What we can do today is to manipulate DNA and re-inject into an egg. Although not nothing, this is not "just its genome."

In 100 years? Probably.

A decent analogy might be:

is it possible to recreate a running program from just it's source?

(lacking a compiler, development and production environments, and perhaps user inputs)

so my feeling is, not really, to an approximation

Sure it's possible. (I've recreated programs from source despite lacking the compiler, etc., originally used on it. The trick is to adapt something else to the task.) The source contains instructions on how it works, and those instructions can be used elsewhere.