Genomics and Biology of Fruit Crop Department founds its roots in the recent evolution of the large investments done in the last ten years on genomics of the fruit crops (grape, apple, pear, but also strawberry and raspberry) and in the translation of thee efforts in both comprehensive olistic approaches to modern biology as well as marker assisted breeding. Up-to-date technologies has been acquired in order to lead the sequencing of two genomes (apple and grape), and to participate to other genomic projects (pear, raspberry, olive, strawberry) and they currently are used to refine the listed genomes and resequencing varieties (genotyping and RNAseq) with various purposes. Our parallel interests in several "omics" (genomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics) aim to dissect biological events, with particular attention to fruit and flower development, plant-pathogen interaction, plant habitus, dormancy break, post-harvest as other events correlated to plant management, plant productivity and fruit shelf-life. Olistic approaches are supposed to supply a strong support to the breeding activity, and also high-throughput phenotypic analysis has been set up to implement marker development. Finally, the study of small and microRNA has been recently introduced to identify the role that these small molecules have in the biological events listed above.

Head of the department : Riccardo Velasco

Administrative staff: Lona Emma