It is the very first step to all kinds of genetic analyses, especially for anything comparative. Usually with most species, we only have access to 'bits' of the

It is the very first step to all kinds of genetic analyses, especially for anything comparative. Usually with most species, we only have access to 'bits' of the genome rather than the whole chromosomes - a shortcoming of current short-read sequencing technologies. This means it's hard to get a broad picture of things like large-scale sequence rearrangements within the genome. There's a whole range of emerging technologies trying to alleviate that though, but aggregating them all together is a mind-numbing hassle. The end result, though, is that now that we have access to a high quality picture of what sequences belong to what chromosomes, we can compare other varieties to that reference, see what structural differences (that really means 'sequences moving around') occurred over the course of evolution, when they occurred, why (in evolution terms) they may have occurred, and so on. Understanding that is key to do all kinds of cool experiments (or from an industrial perspective, optimizations) that weren't accessible to us previously, and the stakes are very high when dealing with such a staple crop that feeds billions of people. Also, many varieties of wheat are hexaploid - their chromosomes come by six, instead of two for us humans. This isn't that exceptional for plants, but it means sorting out the chromosomes with the right alleles when almost each sequence is more or less replicated six times is, as the article title says, a nightmare of complexity. So even if you skip what others and I have said before, it is a technical prowess and it sets a very hopeful precedent for future projects involving other species of similar complexity, and many crops and plants happen to belong to that category.