Pepper Breeding and Genetics

Pepper (Capsicum genus) is a main vegetable and spice crop originated in the American tropics and nowadays cultivated all over the world in temperate and tropical areas. Given its wide diversity, the crop is extremely versatile and suitable for innumerable uses as food and non-food products. In the past decades, pepper breeding focused on the use of wild and domesticated species to transfer beneficial traits, particularly for resistance to major pathogens and pests. By exploiting the existing natural variation these activities allowed to map causative genes underlying the variation of major traits. Change of the scenario in agriculture linked to global warming, demographic trends, and changes in consumer preferences, require further efforts to discover and bred new alleles of agronomic and qualitative interest. The advancement in the field of molecular biology and cutting-edge next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies, including the progress in genome sequencing of major cultivated and domesticated pepper species, have unlocked wide sources of genetic and genomic information that can be now exploited by breeders and scientists’ community. Breeding of pepper has major macro-objectives to achieve and related to: (a) main agronomic traits; (b) resistances to biotic and abiotic stresses which still limit the cultivation in certain areas; (c) quality mostly related to the content of various bioactive and nutraceutical compounds. This special issue aims to collect original articles, reviews, or perspective articles focused on breeding activities using classical genetics as well as genomic approaches for pepper improvement. Studies focusing on the exploration of the existing diversity and its exploitation in integrated approaches toward the identification of novel alleles and superior phenotypes are welcome.

Dr. Pasquale Tripodi

Guest Editor

Keywords

Submission Deadline: 30 September 2022

Online Submission

Manuscripts should be submitted online through Hapres Online Submission System. Please visit Guide for Authors before submitting a manuscript. Authors are encouraged to submit a paper as soon as it is ready and don’t need to wait until the deadline. Submissions will be sent to peer-review in order of arrival. Accepted papers will be published continuously in Crop Breeding, Genetics and Genomics (CBGG) and then gathered together on the special issue webpage. If interested to contribute, please submit a 200–300 words pitch to the Editorial Office indicating a tentative title, authors, and key points of the study for pre-approval.

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