It's necessary to sequence all these so presumably they can be recreated if/when they go extinct.
Having a monoculture of crops is a terrible vulnerability. Look at what is happening with our current monoculture of bananas.
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.
sorry for leading with a negative, I know it can come across more strongly than I intend.
There was a scifi story about such a scenario, I think it was entitled "No Blade of Grass" by John Christopher.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_bank
e.g.
Digital versions can be replicated and distributed at 0 cost.
> 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
We should indeed continue with seed vaults. But I'd feel better with a backup for that in the form of digital data.
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.
Human knowledge is more then English alphabet characters and not all concepts translate properly.
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.
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
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.