Insights into the population structure and association mapping in globe artichoke.

Understanding the population genetic structure of crop gene pool is a fundamental prerequisite in plant evolutionary biology and plant breeding. Based on this consideration, in this chapter we pursued two main aims. The first was to review the status of the research pointed at deciphering the population structure of the gene pools of globe artichoke. The second was to show how the use of a well-characterized germplasm collection together with deep genotyping could serve the identification of QTLs for traits of agronomic and economic relevance in globe artichoke.