HONG KONG University is setting up a multi-national research centre which will be the first in the world to study China's vast wheat collection in detail.
Wheat expert Harold Corke of the botany department said the mainland had agreed for the first time to allow access to its store of 40,000 different strains of the grass - one of the world's biggest collections.
Chinese farmers needed to learn about quality as, with the opening of the market, consumers were allowed to buy foreign wheat for the first time and were becoming more selective.
Although the US Midwest is known for its rolling fields of yellow wheat, China produces twice as much and is almost self-sufficient in the grain, growing 90 million tonnes of the 100 million it consumes each year.
The co-ordination centre being formed at the university will enable scientists from China, the US and Hong Kong to study the genetic make-up of the grasses and work out which strains could be crossed to improve quality.
Until now, Chinese breeders have carried out such studies by trial and error - growing the seed to produce the grain and testing the bread loaf produced from the wheat flour.
This was time-consuming, and the accepted US quality standard based on how good a loaf the wheat produced was not necessarily useful in China, where most wheat was made into noodles, said Dr Corke.