Corrected sequence of the wheat plastid genome

Wheat is the most important cereal in the world in terms of acreage and productivity. We sequenced and assembled the plastid genome of one Egyptian wheat cultivar using next-generation sequence data. The size of the plastid genome is 133,873 bp, which is 672 bp smaller than the published plastid genome of "Chinese Spring" cultivar, due mainly to the presence of three sequences from the rice plastid genome. The difference in size between the previously published wheat plastid genome and the sequence reported here is due to contamination of the published genome with rice plastid DNA, most of which is present in three sequences of 332, 131 and 131 bp. The corrected plastid genome of wheat has been submitted to GenBank (accession number KJ592713) and can be used in future comparisons.