For over ten years Troms Oblat (TO) has been growing wheat in the Sub Polar regions of Northern Norway. It all began with the sowing of Einkorn, early spring 2014, and this diploid or seven chromosomal species of wheat, T. Monococcum have been the key focus in the activities of TO since then. Three years later, TO started sowing a field of haploploid breadwheats, this wheat is the northernmost wheat ever produced. We managed after a couple of years to produce oblatas made from flour of this wheat, and these were formally and with much pride handed over to the our local parish and church administration, The Holy Sepulchre Church in Jerusalem and The Holy Father Pope Franciscus in the Vatican. The Communion and the eucharist is central in the Catholic realm, so TO have been fortunate enough to have been given the chance to meet with the pope and present him with our products no less than three times.
The T. Monococcum batch of 2020 was Whole Genome Sequenced, the WGS was done 2023 in Cambridge, England. This model genome is very likely to hold new and valuable information for wheat and cereal research, but could also possibly play a pivotal future role in understanding and simulating biochemical and pharmacological processes. This sequence is the mainframe for our analysis, and necessary continuation of research on large single alpha locused genomes. Two years ago TO performed a RNA analysis of a Winter Wheat developed here in the arctic. The encoding of the accumulated volumes of this strain will likely shed more light upon the coding area of the genome. VRN-1, VRN-2 and VRN-3 are genomic markers associated with this analysis.
Besides from these and a F7 breadwheat that are planned to be sequenced this year, TO have aligned with the Chinese Spring wheat, after a visit and meeting with the Beijing Institute of Botany early 2024, where matters around both the Monococcum and the Winter Wheat were discussed. TO admitted that it wished to align with the research and analyzes made on their Chinese Spring, Another field trip to China in late 2024 was had to connect with and further study the Sichuan wheat landrace Chinese Spring. IBCAS gave us CS seeds and we have grown it up here, in the North for three seasons, and it is a fantastic wheat in all ways.
Another interesting wheat project is the wild wheat collected from around the walls of Jerusalem. It is a splended dicoccum which thrives here in the North, and has for four seasons. Wild wheat from Turkey and the Anatolian plains have also been collected and grown together with the above strains.
In addition to extending our core DB with mRNA sequences of Monococcum we have also added arctic F2 Soy plant grown by TO and a methylization project where the fine northern potato strain «Guldøye» have been grown and overwintered for three seasons underground to our portfolio. This methylization project is meant to restrengthen the genes of this potato strain, which is said to only grow above the polar circle.
Fortunately we have also been able to participate in several important and prestigious events the recent years:
PAG Australia 2024, PAG 25 San Diego and PAG Asia, New Dehli.
The 3. International Wheat Conference in Perth, Australia, The 4. International Wheat Conference in Bologna; Italy and the International Gluten Workshop in Palermo 2026.
In the time ahead; the work on design and preproduction of components for use in the handling and analysis of large data quantities started in 2016, this hopefully materializes via our attempts to interest brands in the sequencing world and possibly gets integrated in the circuitry that is specifically involved in sequencing genomes, and perhaps also finds its secondary use in the distribution systems of cloud and satellite data.
A survey system of delineating data, based on observation of simple shoreline algoritms, from a macroscopic to a local cartographical perspective, have been a substantional area of interest for TO for many years. And TO have a deep and thorough understanding of geofactors in the whole spectrum of scales involved.
This survey system, and a long running topological K model used for plotting, and decompositioning custom weekly and daily satellite data, to our small test wheat fields, have enabled us to develop a electronically predictive ceramic that is in direct contact to the field. Annotation and library construction on the polar sequence comes direct, naturally and instantanious.
Nevertheless, the Monococcum WGS is the core of TO. Convinced of the genetic properties and the qualitative data connected to this model organism, we are reaching out to developers of pipeline systems in the genetic business to include rather than bounce off of, or exclude the framework present in Wheat, specifically the Monococcum.