Barley suffers from an image problem. Who would guess that it is one of the world's most important crops? A quick review of a recent UC Riverside press release uncovers the reason: Besides being a healthful cereal, animal feed and potential bio-fuel crop, barley is the grain of choice for making beer. Barley beer was probably the first drink developed by Neolithic humans, according to Wikipedia.

The release, written by Iqbal Pittalwala, says UC Riverside will receive a $1 million grant from USDA to map the barley genome, a necessary step in breeding new barley varieties that improve yield, disease resistance, and food and malt quality.

The release said barley is one of the first domesticated cereal grains and today No. 4 in terms of production. It is geographically adaptable and can withstand cold, drought, alkali and salinity. Pittalwala wrote that barley has been a favorite target of geneticists for decades. The genome – with 5.3 billion letters of genetic code – is one of the largest among cereal crops and nearly twice the size of the human genome.

The story was picked up by some technical publications - Genome Web News and Medical News Today, to name two. But ultimately, the research will benefit a wide swath of peoples the world over.