NEW YORK, Dec. 10 - DuPont today said it has deposited into GenBank more than 200,000 wheat ESTs.
The addition, which represents DuPont's entire stockpile, will more than double the amount of wheat-genome data currently residing in GenBank, according to the company.
The additional data "is a valuable addition to GenBank because these specific ESTs were not previously represented," said Olin Anderson, research leader with the US Department of Agriculture and coordinator of wheat and barley ESTs for the International Triticeae Mapping Initiative, in the UK.
Doyle Karr, a spokesman for DuPont, stressed the company will continue to study the crop.
DuPont's timing is prescient. According to the USDA, the US wheat stockpile this year will shrink to 348 million bushels--half of what was on hand before this year's harvest, and the smallest ending-stocks figure since 1973.