Sergio Lanteri

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at University of Turin

The DOWNY MILDEW RESISTANCE 6 (DMR6) protein is a 2-oxoglutarate (2OG) and Fe(II)-dependent oxygenase, involved in salicylic acid (SA) metabolism, and its inactivation in tomato was found to increase SA levels and to confer disease-resistance against several pathogens. SA is also recognized as an abiotic stress-tolerance enhancer, and we tested the...

Eggplant (Solanum melongena) is an important Solanaceous crop, widely cultivated and consumed in Asia, the Mediterranean basin, and Southeast Europe. Its domestication centers and migration and diversification routes are still a matter of debate. We report the largest georeferenced and genotyped collection to this date for eggplant and its wild rel...

Globe artichoke capitula are susceptible to browning due to oxidation of phenols caused by the activity of polyphenol oxidases (PPOs), this reduces their suitability for fresh or processed uses. A genome-wide analysis of the globe artichoke PPO gene family was performed. Bioinformatics analyses identified eleven PPOs and their genomic and amino aci...

Eggplant (Solanum melongena) is a major vegetable crop with great potential for genetic improvement owing to its large and mostly untapped genetic diversity. Eggplant is closely related to over 500 species of Solanum subgenus Leptostemonum, belonging to its primary, secondary, and tertiary genepools, and exhibits a wide range of characteristics, in...

Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) is one of the most widely grown vegetables in the world and is impacted by many diseases which cause yield reduction or even crop failure. Breeding for disease resistance is thus a key objective in tomato improvement. Since disease arises from a compatible interaction between a plant and a pathogen, a mutation which...

Persian buttercup (Ranunculus asiaticus L.) and poppy anemone (Anemone coronaria L.) are ornamental, outcrossing, perennial species belonging to the Ranunculaceae family, characterized by large and highly repetitive genomes. We applied K-seq protocol in both species to generate high-throughput sequencing data and produce a large number of genetic p...

Phytophthora infestans, the causal agent of late blight (LB) in tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.), is a devastating disease and a serious concern for plant productivity. The presence of susceptibility (S) genes in plants facilitates pathogen proliferation; thus, disabling these genes may help provide a broad-spectrum and durable type of tolerance/re...

Persian Buttercup (Ranunculus asiaticus L.; 2x=2n=16; estimated genome size: 7.6Gb) is an ornamental and perennial crop native of Asia Minor and Mediterranean basin, marketed both as cut flower or potted plant. Currently new varieties are developed by selecting plants carrying desirable traits in segregating progenies obtained by controlled mating,...

Gene editing has already proved itself as an invaluable tool for the generation of mutants for crop breeding, yet its ultimate impact on agriculture will depend on how crops generated by gene editing technologies are regulated, and on our ability to characterize the impact of mutations on plant phenotype. A starting operational strategy for evaluat...

Eggplant (Solanum melongena L.; 2n = 24) is one of the most important Solanaceae vegetables and is primarily cultivated in China (approximately 42% of world production) and India (approximately 39%). Thousand-grain weight (TGW) is an important trait that affects eggplant breeding cost and variety promotion. This trait is controlled by quantitative...

Anemone coronaria L. (2n = 2x = 16) is a perennial, allogamous, highly heterozygous plant marketed as a cut flower or in gardens. Due to its large genome size, limited efforts have been made in order to develop species-specific molecular markers. We obtained the first draft genome of the species by Illumina sequencing an androgenetic haploid plant...

In horticulture, grafting is a popular technique used to combine positive traits from two different plants. This is achieved by joining the plant top part (scion) onto a rootstock which contains the stem and roots. Rootstocks can provide resistance to stress and increase plant production, but despite their wide use, the biological mechanisms drivin...

Capsicum annuum L. is one of the most cultivated Solanaceae species, and in the open field, water limitation leading to drought stress affects its fruit quality, fruit setting, fruit size and ultimately yield. We identified stage-specific and a common core set of differentially expressed genes, following RNA-seq transcriptome analyses of a breeding...

Significance This study provides a deep population genomic analysis of 10,000 Capsicum accessions held in genebanks and representing a frame of the global diversity of the genus. By combining single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) based data and passport information, we investigated the genomic diversity and population structure of wild and domesti...

Vegetables are an integral part of the human diet worldwide. Traditional breeding approaches have been used extensively to develop new cultivars of vegetables with desirable characteristics, including resistance/tolerance to biotic and abiotic stresses, high yield, and an elevated content of compounds beneficial to human health. The technological p...

Eggplant (Solanum melongena L.) represents the third most important crop of the Solanaceae family and is an important component of our daily diet. A population of 164 F6 recombinant inbred lines (RILs), derived from two eggplant lines differing with respect to several key agronomic traits, “305E40” and “67/3,” was grown to the commercial maturation...

Eggplant (Solanum melongena L.) is an important horticultural crop and one of the most widely grown vegetables from the Solanaceae family. It was domesticated from a wild, prickly progenitor carrying small, round, non‐anthocyanic fruits. We obtained a novel, highly contiguous genome assembly of the eggplant ‘67/3’ reference line, by Hi‐C retrofitti...

Polyphenol oxidases (PPOs) catalyze the oxidization of polyphenols, which in turn causes the browning of the eggplant berry flesh after cutting. This has a negative impact on fruit quality for both industrial transformation and fresh consumption. Ten PPO genes (named SmelPPO1-10) were identified in eggplant thanks to the recent availability of a hi...

Globe artichoke ( Cynara cardunculus var. scolymus; 2n=2x= 34) is cropped largely in the Mediterranean region, being Italy the leading world producer; however, over time, its cultivation has spread to the Americas and China. In 2016, we released the first (v1.0) globe artichoke genome sequence (http://www.artichokegenome.unito.it/). Its assembly wa...

Eggplant is the second most important solanaceous berry-producing crop after tomato. Despite mapping studies based on bi-parental progenies and GWAS approaches having been performed, an eggplant intraspecific high-resolution map is still lacking. We developed a RIL population from the intraspecific cross ‘305E40’, (androgenetic introgressed line ca...

Sweet pepper (Capsicum annuum L.) is a high value crop and one of the most widely grown vegetables belonging to the Solanaceae family. In addition to commercial varieties and F1 hybrids, a multitude of landraces are grown, whose genetic combination is the result of hundreds of years of random, environmental, and farmer selection. High genetic diver...

Here we focus on the highly conserved MYB-bHLH-WD repeat (MBW) transcriptional complex model in eggplant, which is pivotal in the transcriptional regulation of the anthocyanin biosynthetic pathway. Through a genome-wide approach performed on the recently released Eggplant Genome (cv. 67/3) previously identified, and reconfirmed by us, members belon...

Here we focus on the highly conserved MYB-bHLH-WD repeat (MBW) transcriptional complex model in eggplant, which is pivotal in the transcriptional regulation of the anthocyanin biosynthetic pathway. Through a genome-wide approach performed on the recently released Eggplant Genome (cv. 67/3) previously identified, and reconfirmed by us, members belon...

In horticulture, grafting is a popular technique used to combine positive traits from two different plants. This is achieved by joining the plant top part (scion) onto a rootstock which contains the stem and roots. Despite its wide use, the biological mechanisms driving rootstock-induced alterations of the scion phenotype remain largely unknown. Gi...

DNA methylation through the activity of cytosine-5-methyltransferases (C5-MTases) and DNA demethylases plays important roles in genome protection as well as in regulating gene expression during plant development and plant response to environmental stresses. In this study, we report on a genome-wide identification of six C5-MTases (SmelMET1, SmelCMT...

With approximately 450 species, spiny Solanum species constitute the largest monophyletic group in the Solanaceae family, but a high-quality genome assembly from this group is presently missing. We obtained a chromosome-anchored genome assembly of eggplant (Solanum melongena), containing 34,916 genes, confirming that the diploid gene number in the...

Single primer enrichment technology (SPET) is a new, robust, and customizable solution for targeted genotyping. Unlike genotyping by sequencing (GBS), and like DNA chips, SPET is a targeted genotyping technology, relying on the sequencing of a region flanking a primer. Its reliance on single primers, rather than on primer pairs, greatly simplifies...

Traditional European medicine has attributed to globe artichoke, as well as to its close relatives cultivated and wild cardoons, many beneficial properties to treat chronic liver diseases, jaundice, hepatitis and arteriosclerosis. Indeed, globe artichoke is a source of bio-active compounds, such as caffeoylquinic acid derivatives (chlorogenic acid...

Genetic variation within globe artichoke landraces contributes to the variable yield performance detected in cultivation. It was built up over many generations of vegetative propagation as a consequence of the limited selection applied by farmers as well as the accumulation of mutations. This chapter reports the results obtained by applying clonal...

A first assembly of globe artichoke genome was released in 2016 and the project required the adoption of a set of strategies to overcome the lack of a homozygous reference genotype. Moreover, the inability to exploit standard genotyping methods, normally adopted in inbred species where homozygous segregating progenies can be more easily obtained, p...

The first reference genome sequence of the highly heterozygous globe artichoke has been recently released (January 2016, www.artichokegenome.unito.it), organized in 17 pseudomolecules and including about 27,000 predicted genes. Since the release of the first genome draft, it was clear that, due to the its homozygous profile, the plant selected for...

The availability of the genome sequence of globe artichoke and cultivated cardoon, and the development of physical maps in both taxa, have provided new opportunities to study genetic variation between varietal types to an unprecedented scale, thus contributing to dissect the path from sequence variation to phenotype. Furthermore, they have also pro...

The first high-quality genome assembly of the globe artichoke has been produced within the Compositae Genome Project and the resequencing analyses of four globe artichoke genotypes, representative of the core varietal types, as well as a genotype of the related taxa cultivated cardoon was, later on, carried out. The Web site “www.artichokegenome.un...

Thanks to the recent development of NGS technologies, draft genomes are at present available for many crops. However, most of the genome sequences are incomplete and highly fragmented because they rely on the alignment of billions of short-sequence reads and do not comprehensively report on genomic elements such as highly variable regions and DNA r...

Genome annotation makes it possible to identify the coding and non-coding regions of a genome, such as exons-introns, regulatory elements, repeats as well as gene functions and locations. The newly developed eggplant genome sequence (see Chap. 7) was masked using RepeatMasker, by combining homology-based and de novo approaches, and ~73% of the eggp...

Pepper (Capsicum spp.) belongs to the Solanaceae, which is an economically important family of flowering plants consisting of about 102 genera and over 2500 species. The Solanaceae family includes crops of agronomic importance for which the efforts in genome sequencing are ongoing by almost 10 years (https://www.solgenomics.net/organism/sol100/view...

Poster abstract

This book presents the latest information on the genetics and genomics of the globe artichoke. It focuses on the latest findings, tools and strategies employed in genome sequencing, physical map development and QTL analyses, as well as genomic resources. The re-sequencing of four globe artichoke genotypes, representative of the core varietal types...

Cynara cardunculus L. (family Asteraceae, a.k.a. Compositae; 2n=2x=34) is an outcrossing species that includes three fully cross-compatible botanical taxa: globe artichoke (var. scolymus (L.) Fiori), cultivated cardoon (var. altilis D.C.) and their common ancestor wild cardoon (var. sylvestris (Lam.) Fiori). Recently, we published the sequence of t...

Cynara cardunculus, a member of the Asteraceae family, comprises the three taxa var. scolymus (globe artichoke), var. altilis (cultivated cardoon) and the ancestral var. sylvestris (wild cardoon). The substantial quantities of lignocellulosic biomass produced by these plants (up to 30.0 t/ha year⁻¹ dry matter by the cultivated cardoon) can be used...

We have characterized the simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers of the eggplant (Solanum melongena) using a recent high quality sequence of its whole genome. We found nearly 133,000 perfect SSRs, a density of 125.5 SSRs/Mbp, and also about 178,400 imperfect SSRs. Of the perfect SSRs, 15.6% were complex, with two stretches of repeats separated by an...

Globe artichoke (Cynara cardunculus var. scolymus) is a cross-pollinated, highly heterozygous species, which is conventionally propagated vegetatively. A scheme is described here which combines phenotypic with genotypic selection to fast track the development of a seed-propagated variety. The scheme was tested by making three selections, on a pheno...

Fusarium spp. and Verticillium spp. are widespread soil pathogens responsible for vascular wilts causing heavy yield losses in eggplant (Solanum melongena) as well as in many other crops. Here we report on the identification of QTLs affecting the resistance to Fusarium and Verticillium in an F2 intraspecific population of 156 individuals bred from...

The genome sequence of globe artichoke (Cynara cardunculus L. var. scolymus, 2n = 2x = 34) is now available for use. A survey of C. cardunculus genetic resources is essential for understanding the evolution of the species, carrying out genetic studies and for application of breeding strategies. We report on the resequencing analyses (~35×) of four...

Genome editing technologies enable the precise modification of selected traits in plant genomes aiming to obtain new varieties with desirable phenotypes. Among gene editing techniques, CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced palindromic repeats)/Cas9 has emerged in recent years for its simplicity, versatility and efficiency in a variety of differen...

Brinjal (Solanum melongena), scarlet (S. aethiopicum) and gboma (S. macrocarpon) eggplants are three Old World domesticates. The genomic DNA of a collection of accessions belonging to the three cultivated species, along with a representation of various wild relatives, was characterized for the presence of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) usin...

The recently acquired genome sequence of globe artichoke (Cynara cardunculus var. scolymus) has been used to catalog the genome’s content of simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers. More than 177,000 perfect SSRs were revealed, equivalent to an overall density across the genome of 244.5 SSRs/Mbp, but some 224,000 imperfect SSRs were also identified. A...

Eggplant, pepper, and tomato are the most exploited berry-producing vegetables within the Solanaceae family. Their genomes differ in size, but each has 12 chromosomes which have undergone rearrangements causing a redistribution of loci. The genome sequences of all three species are available but differ in coverage, assembly quality and percentage o...

List of eggplant QTL identified by Barchi et al. (2012) and Portis et al. (2014, 2015).

The pepper QTL identified by Yarnes et al. (2013).

The pepper markers aligned on pepper genome sequence.

The eggplant and pepper markers grouped by clusters.

The table shows the clusters observed in the alignment of eggplant and pepper markers. The eggplant traits are given in the left column while on the right the pepper traits included in each cluster are reported.

Details of chromosome synteny between tomato CDS and pepper genome. Physical positions of tomato CDS matching pepper genome in detail. The relative position of tomato CDS is shown on the ordinate axis while on the abscissa axis there are the normalized pepper chromosomes. The captions on the right show the chromosome of origin of tomato CDS. Physic...

The eggplant markers aligned on pepper genome sequence.

QTL location (only loci harboring QTL are shown). The figure is complementary with the Supplementary Table S5 and shows the loci bearing both eggplant and pepper markers. The scale shown on the Y axis indicates the LOD score. The scale on the X axis indicates the position on pepper chromosome in Mbps. Map positions of the QTL are given by the peaks...

Scientific Reports 6 : Article number: 19427 10.1038/srep19427 ; published online: 20 January 2016 ; updated: 23 May 2016 . In this Article, there are typographical errors in the legend of Figure 5.

Eggplant berries are a source of health-promoting metabolites including antioxidant and nutraceutical compounds, mainly anthocyanins and chlorogenic acid; however, they also contain some anti-nutritional compounds such as steroidal glycoalkaloids (SGA) and saponins, which are responsible for the bitter taste of the flesh and with potential toxic ef...

Globe artichoke (Cynara cardunculus var. scolymus) is an out-crossing, perennial, multi-use crop species that is grown worldwide and belongs to the Compositae, one of the most successful Angiosperm families. We describe the first genome sequence of globe artichoke. The assembly, comprising of 13,588 scaffolds covering 725 of the 1,084 Mb genome, wa...

Eggplant is a source of health-promoting metabolites including antioxidant and nutraceutical compounds such as peel anthocyanins and chlorogenic acid of the flesh with anti-diabetic, hypotensive, cardioprotective, and hepatoprotective properties. On the other hand, it is also characterized by the presence of some anti-nutritional compounds such as...

An eggplant ( Solanum melongena ) association panel of 191 accessions, comprising a mixture of breeding lines, old varieties and landrace selections was SNP genotyped and phenotyped for key breeding fruit and plant traits at two locations over two seasons. A genome-wide association (GWA) analysis was performed using the mixed linear model, which ta...

The bracts of the globe artichoke inflorescence vary in their pigmentation and the extent of fleshy thorn development. Here, a genetic analysis of these two traits is presented, based on a pre-existing and well-characterized mapping population derived from a cross between a globe artichoke variety and a cultivated cardoon. While both traits appeare...

The dietary value of many plant polyphenols lies in the protection given against degenerative pathologies. Their in planta role is associated with the host's defense response against biotic and abiotic stress. The polyphenol content of a given plant tissue is strongly influenced by the growing environment, but is also genetically determined. Plants...

The first high-quality genome assembly of the globe artichoke (Cynara cardunculus var. scolymus) has been recently produced at the DISAFA (Plant Genetics and Breeding) within the Compositae Genome Project (Scaglione et al. 2016, Sci. Rep. 6, 19427; doi: 10.1038/srep19427). The assembly contains 13K scaffolds (N50= 125 Kbp), which represent 725 Mb o...