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- Climate change is causing greater variation in weather patterns with higher rainfall occurring in the traditional wheat drilling window of September to November in the UK, these erratic weather events are also evident across Europe and are affecting a variety of crops. On top of these unpredictable weather events, UK winter wheat drilling also faces the issue of blackgrass and Barley yellow dwarf virus (BYDV) which also push farmers to drill later in the season, thus resulting in a reduced optimum drilling window leading to lower yields. As we continue to observe the effects of climate change, new races of wheat diseases have evolved to overcome varietal resistances at ever faster rates, with unexpectedly high levels of Septori tritici, the most damaging foliar disease of UK winter wheat being noted in the 2021 and 2022 seasons (Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB)). Thus, there is increasing demand/pressure to accelerate the breeding of climate and pathogen resilient wheat varieties. Genome-based breeding has the potential to accelerate wheat breeding and achieve the ultimate objective of ensuring sustainable wheat production through developing high yielding, climate-resilient wheat cultivars with high nutritional quality. In order, to breed for the future, hybrid and spring wheat development has become paramount, as heterosis and having robust spring wheats can offer increased yield stability. Hence the need to develop a gold standard in-house reference genome, mapping populations and identify markers (genetic) to implement marker-assisted selection. There has been tremendous progress in development of whole-genome sequencing resources in wheat and its progenitor species during the last 5 years. These advances have intrigued wheat researchers to practice less pursued, but very powerful, analytical approaches. However, these have proven to be difficult to implement commercially due to the current reference genome sequence. The current gold reference genome, Chinese Spring, is very distant from the majority of breeding germplasm used in most wheat breeding companies. The current publically available wheat genomes are also very distant from our current breeding germplasm. Therefore, the publically available pangenome does not contain some of the very important haplotypes that we have in our germplasm. Hence the following strategies cannot be easily pursued (i) environmental genome-wide association studies in wheat genetic resources stored in genebanks to identify genes for local adaptation by using agro-climatic traits as phenotypes, (ii) haplotype-based analyses to improve the statistical power and resolution of genomic selection and gene mapping experiments, (iii) new breeding strategies for genome-based prediction of heterosis patterns in wheat, and (iv) ultimate use of genomics information to develop more efficient and robust genome wide genotyping platforms to precisely predict higher yield potential and stability with greater precision (Athiyannan et al., 2022). We propose developing a reference level genome for one of the most popular winter wheats grown in the UK (https://ahdb.org.uk/news/ahdb-planting-variety-survey-confirms-wheat-area-recovery-grain-market-daily) and mine for genetic markers to track important haplotypes. With help from next-generation sequencing technologies, a more focused development of an in house specific reference genome is now a possibility. The majority of wheat breeding companies have embarked on having internal reference genomes which suite their breeding germplasms. For eaxample breeders in South Africa sequenced internal reference genomes (Athiyannan et al., 2022) and identified critical haplotype. The reference genome construction will revolve around the use of a hybrid sequencing approach, which entails the use of long-read sequencing, optical maps and short read sequences. The long-read sequencing generated will also provide us vital structural variation information