Dr. Paolo Boccacci, at the Turin Headquarter, is the guest editor of a Special Issue, titled “Evolutionary Genomics of Crops and Its Wild Relatives“, which will be published in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijms).
“Wild relatives of crop plants are recognized as a fundamental resource for agricultural activity. Traditional landraces have been widely sampled and stored in germplasm collections over previous centuries, but collection programs for the respective wild plants have been planned only recently. Domesticated and wild forms have been influenced by human activity over thousands of years and signatures of their activity have been deeply impressed in plant genomes. Both forms are an essential source for genomic studies to unravel the domestication process. Phylogenetic traits can be tracked by genetic and genomic analysis, obser ving the variations accumulated over time. Moreover, genomic analyses permit to obtain important information about the time frames and geographic places of domestication areas, the involvement of putative secondar y domestication events and past and present selection pressures.”
