Professor Fiona Doohan:

We do. It depends on the crop but we know about it based on genetics. One of the great aspects of biotechnology - people often wonder why we should fund basic science and this is one of the reasons and it is very important - is that we learned a great deal from evolutionary biology studies as to where wheat came from, how it evolved, and based on that evolution and the fact that it evolved differently in China, in South America and in the Fertile Crescent, where it came from Iran. Because of that difference in evolution and genetics, we now look at those things that have evolved differently and see how we can use those in breeding programmes. We trace back with what are called the progenitors or the parents, the old ancestors of wheat from thousands of years ago. We have all that information and all the genomic sequence for that as well to follow and map that.