11 Mar 2019 --- A team of Russian biologists have been studying the enzymes which help wheat to fight fungi, examining the reaction of wheat plants to damage caused by pathogenic fungi. The research results and enzyme classification were published in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences. The complexity of study refers to the fact that wheat is polyploid, meaning that each cell has several sets of chromosomes. Wheat species used in agriculture, Tríticum aestívum, were cultivated by crossbreeding of Triticum Urartu, Aegilops tauschii and related species. As a result, the wheat genome is complex and contains 107 thousand genes – almost five times more than a human genome, according to the research.
