LettuceGDB project initialized
In the last 20 years, as an important vegetable, the size of lettuce grown field increased two thirds and the yield almost doubled as the following statistic data display from FAO. Meanwhile, the research on genomics has been blossomed mainly promoted by sequencing technology. Main crops such as rice and maize have accessed to a new era where the breeding program are powdered by huge amount of multi-omics data.
In order to catch up with the research on main crops, we initialized lettuce genome project (LettuceGDB), aiming to accelerate the research and breeding programs with cutting-edge omics technology.
Figure 1. Global area and yield of lettuce. A, Produciton/Yield quantities of lettuce and chicory in world from 1994 to 2018. B, The distribution of yield of lettuce and chicory in 2018. Data are from FAO.
In addition, lettuce as a representative organism, is a decent model system for the study of Asteraceae and related scientific topics such as diversity, adaptation, domestication and morphology development in terms of its large number of cultivars (over 1000). For example, breeders have developed abundant cultivars with obvious phenotypic changes (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Main types of lettuce cultivars. Wild type is also named prickly lettuce (Lactuca serriola).
Germplasm