Research interests Dr. Francesca Bellinazzo

De novo domestication in the Asteraceae family

Domestication is a long and gradual process that began in prehistoric times and has enabled humans to cultivate crop plants that provide safe and nutritious food. During the Green Revolutions of the twentieth century, plant breeding techniques advanced rapidly, leading to dramatic increases in crop yield and resource-use efficiency.

We are now entering a new era of crop improvement, enabled by precise genome editing technologies and rapidly expanding genetic knowledge. With the tools at hand, we can now undertake the challenge of generating new crops starting from wild or partially domesticated species by introducing a relatively small number of key domestication traits. This approach, known as de novo domestication, offers several advantages:

• Resilience: Wild species are often naturally vigorous and equipped to withstand biotic and abiotic stress.
• Fine-tuning: Precise gene targeting minimizes the introduction of unwanted traits.
• Diversity: Domestication traits can be introduced into genetically diverse populations.
• Novelty: Entirely new crops can be developed.

The Asteraceae family, characterized by daisy-like flowers, is the largest family of flowering plants, comprising approximately 25,000 species. Despite this diversity, only a handful of species are currently cultivated as crops. One important member of this family is lettuce (Lactuca sativa), which is emerging as a powerful model system due to its amenability to genetic transformation and the growing availability of genomic resources.

Understanding the molecular basis of key domestication traits in lettuce provides an important foundation for developing new Asteraceae crops through de novo domestication.

Research goals

• Identifying domestication genes in lettuce and understanding their mode of action
• Selecting populations wild Aster species suitable for domestication
• Engineering and testing novel crops

Methods

• Gene expression studies
• Forward genetics
• Plant transformation
• Genome editing using CRISPR-Cas
• Low- and high-throughput phenotyping