By assembling and studying the genome of a wild relative of modern wheat, a team led by scientists from Shandong Agricultural University has identified a gene that drives resistance to a fungal disease, fusarium head blight (FHB), that devastates cultivated wheat crops. The scientists assembled the genome of Thinopyrum elongatum, a wild wheatgrass with known resistance to FHB, then identified and cloned the FHB resistance gene Fhb7.