Probably known by the Egyptians and used as food and/or medicinal plants by the ancient Greeks and Romans, this species gradually underwent a process of naturalization and domestication in Europe during the past few centuries. This plant species belongs to the Asteraceae family and includes several cultivar groups whose commercial food products are the leaves, namely Witloof, Pain de sucre, and Catalogne, as well as several types of Radicchio.įrom the reproductive point of view, Radicchio is prevalently allogamous, due to an efficient sporophytic self-incompatibility system, proterandry and gametophytic competition favoring allo-pollen grains and tubes. foliosumL.) is currently one of the most important leaf chicories, used mainly as a component for fresh salads but also very often cooked and prepared differently according to local traditions and alimentary habits.
The common Italian name of Radicchio was adopted in recent years by all the most internationally used languages and indicates a highly differentiated group of chicories, with red or variegated leaves. We are confident that our efforts will extend the current knowledge of the genome organization and gene composition of leaf chicory, which is crucial for developing new tools and diagnostic markers useful for our breeding strategies in Radicchio. Sequencing reactions were performed with the Illumina platforms HiSeq and MySeq, and sequence reads were then assembled and annotated. Genomic DNA was used for library preparation with the TruSeq DNA Sample Preparation chemistry (Illumina). The plant material used for the sequencing of the leaf chicory genome belongs to the Radicchio of the Chioggia type. Indeed, the availability of the first genome sequence for this plant species will provide a powerful tool to be exploited in the identification of markers associated with or genes responsible for relevant agronomic traits, influencing crop productivity and product quality.
Recently, we sequenced and annotated the first draft of the leaf chicory genome, as we believe it will have an extraordinary impact from both scientific and economic points of view. foliosum L.) is one of the most important leaf chicories, used mainly as a component for fresh salads.
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