In a field at the edge of the University of Minnesota’s St. Paul campus, half a dozen students and lab technicians glance up at the darkening afternoon skies. The threatening rain storm might bring relief from the 90-degree August heat, but it won’t help harvest all this wheat. Moving between the short rows, they cut out about 100 spiky heads, put them in a plastic container, and bring them back to a growling Vogel thresher parked at the edge of the plot. From there, they bag and label the grains before loading them in a truck to take back to James Anderson’s lab for analysis.

Inside those bags, the long-time wheat breeder is hoping to find wheat seeds free of a chalky white fungus, Fusarium head blight, that produces a poisonous toxin. He’s looking for new genes that could make wheat resistant to one of the most devastating plant diseases in the world. Anderson runs the university’s wheat breeding program, one of dozens in the US dedicated to improving the crop through generations of traditional breeding, and increasingly, with the aid of genetic technologies. Today his toolbox got a lot bigger.

In a Science report published Thursday, an international team of more than 200 researchers presents the first high-quality, complete sequence of the bread wheat genome. Like a physical map of the monstrous genome—wheat has five times more DNA than you do—the fully annotated sequence provides the location of over 107,000 genes and more than 4 million genetic markers across the plant’s 21 chromosomes. For a staple crop that feeds a third of the world’s population it’s a milestone that may be on par with the day its domestication began 9,000 years ago.

“Having breeders take the information we’ve provided to develop varieties that are more adapted to local areas is really, we think, the foundation of feeding our population in the future,” says Kellye Eversole, the executive director of the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium, the public-private research team that worked for more than a decade to complete the sequence. Founded in 2005, Eversole says the IWGSC’s goal was to help improve new crop traits for a changing world.

Breeding programs like Anderson’s are constantly on the hunt for wheat strains that will meet the needs of farmers facing tough economic and environmental realities. A 2011 study in Science showed that rising temperatures are already causing declines in wheat production. More recent research in Nature suggests that trend is only going to get worse, with a 5 percent decline in wheat yields for every one degree Fahrenheit uptick.

So what kinds of traits make for better wheat? The ability to grow in hotter climates is a plus. And disease resistance is nice. But farmers have other priorities, too. “When selecting a variety they’re looking at yield first, lodging resistance second, and protein content third,” says Anderson. Lodging is when a wheat stalk gets bent over, collapsing under its own weight. Stalk strength is one way to counteract that. But breeders have to be careful to balance those traits with others, like nutritional composition. “We’re trying to build disease resistance into a total package that’s going to be attractive to a grower,” says Anderson.

Building that total package is still a slow, labor-intensive process. Breeders painstakingly pluck out pollen-producing parts from each tiny “spikelet” on a wheat stem so they can fertilize each one with pollen from plants with other desirable traits; repeating that process thousands of times each year. Then they screen and select for traits they want, which requires testing how well thousands of individual plants perform over the growing season. In Anderson’s lab, which focuses on Fusarium head blight resistance, that means spraying test field plots with fungal spores and seeing which ones don’t die. It’s only in the last three years that he’s used gene sequencing technologies to help produce more survivors.