Issue Information

Front cover: Soba (buckwheat, Fagopyrum esculentum ) is a pseudocereal with rich aroma and flavor, which is mainly eaten as noodles after Edo era in Japan. Yet there still remain many problems to overcome: its lower yield than the wheat or rice mainly caused by heteromorphic self‐incompatibility (SI), its allergenic property that sometimes causes severe allergic reactions, and so on. Also, SI has been preventing us from producing good cultivars using genetic approaches. Finally, the buckwheat's whole genome has just been sequenced with next‐generation sequencing (NGS), and it shows us a solution for those problems. We may have low‐allergenic soba noodles in the foreseeable future. Designed by TRAIS Co., Ltd. (Kobe, Japan).