Have you ever read the book No Blade of Grass? The premise of the plot is based on a disease that had wiped out all species of grasses and cereal grains across the planet – including rye, barley, maize, oats – and the great grand-daddy of them all, wheat.

Considering that the human digestive system was not evolved to consume cereal grains, we sure depend a lot on them (chimpanzees normally won't touch cereal grains unless there isn't anything else – and cereal grains don't normally grow without being cultivated). In fact, one member of the grass family, wheat, is considered the most important crop in the world.

So when wheat production around the world is threatened, you can imagine that folks get nervous. What between droughts, changes in the global climate, environmental degradation and exploding population, wheat production everywhere could face some serious problems – and the human problems that would result should be patently obvious.

So...once again, the boys in the science labs are coming to the rescue. Across the pond over at the University of Liverpool, a fellow by the name of Niel Hall led a study that has succeeded in decoding the genome for wheat. You may remember a few years ago when scientists succeeded in decoding the human genome (it was all over the news). For some reason, this one has gotten a lot less publicity, and that's too bad – for a couple of reasons.

First, for the uninitiated who get turned off by "sciency" stuff: a "genome" is basically the blueprint of a living organism. This blueprint is "written" in the DNA. For you and me, our genome determines our hair and eye color, our skin color, our bone structure and even what kind of diseases we're likely to come down with – among a lot of other things.

The human genome contains around 23,000 genes. To put this another way, if our genome is like a software application, the genes are the individual bits of code that put it together and allow us to write and save documents (us being the documents).

What surprised me is the fact that the wheat genome contains over 110,000 genes! Despite what it looks like, wheat is not a simple organism...and other grains, like rice and maize, are tinker-toys in comparison. Despite this, decoding it only took a year, thanks to new computer technologies (in contrast, it took scientists fifteen years to decode the human genome back in the day). 

According to one of the scientists who participated in the study, the results are going to be made available to anyone – particularly botanists and breeders – who what to analyze it and use the information to come up with new, faster-growing heartier strains.

This all is coming not a moment to soon. The estimated worldwide wheat harvest for any given year is around 550 million metric tons, which sounds like a lot – but droughts and wild fires in Russia and floods in China as well as unseasonable hot weather in North America have all put a serious dent in that figure in recent months.

GMO.  Right or wrong, it’s an inevitable future.