Rhizoctonia solani, causing Rhizoctonia crown and root rot, is a major risk to sugar beet (Beta vulgaris L.) cultivation. The development of resistant varieties accelerated by marker-assisted selection is a priority of breeding programs. We report the identification of a single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) marker linked to Rhizoctonia resistance using restriction site-associated DNA (RAD) sequencing of two geographically discrete sets of plant materials with different degrees of resistance/susceptibility to enable a wider selection of superior genotypes. The variant calling pipeline utilized SAMtools for variant calling and the resulting raw SNPs from RAD sequencing (15,988 and 22,439 SNPs) were able to explain 13.40% and 25.45% of the phenotypic variation in the two sets of material from different sources of origin, respectively. An association analysis was carried out independently on both the datasets and mutually occurring significant SNPs were filtered depending on their contribution to the phenotype using principal component analysis (PCA) biplots. To provide a ready-to-use marker for the breeding community, a systematic molecular validation of significant SNPs distributed across the genome was undertaken to combine high-resolution melting, Sanger sequencing, and rhAmp SNP genotyping. We report that RsBv1 located on Chromosome 6 (9,000,093 bp) is significantly associated with Rhizoctonia resistance (p < 0.01) and able to explain 10% of the phenotypic disease variance. The related SNP assay is thus ready for marker-assisted selection in sugar beet breeding for Rhizoctonia resistance.

In this study, we investigated the microbiota of 72 Italian ham samples collected after 12 months of seasoning. The hams were elaborated from pigs fed different rearing methods, including the traditional restricted medium protein diet chosen as control (C group); restrictive low protein diet (LP group); two ad libitum high -protein diet groups (HP9M group: slaughter at 9 months of age; HP170 group: slaughter at 170 kg). A multi-amplicon 16S metabarcoding approach was used, and a total of 2845 Amplicon Sequence Variants were obtained from the 72 ham samples. Main phyla included: Firmicutes (90.8%), Actinobacteria (6.2%), Proteobacteria (2.7%), and Bacteroidota (0.12%). The most common genera were Staphylococcus, Tetragenococcus, and Brevibacterium . Shannon index for alpha-diversity was found statistically significant, notably for the HP9M group, indicating higher diversity compared to C. PERMANOVA test on beta-diversity showed significant differences in rearing methods between HP170 and C, HP170 and LP, and HP9M vs. C. All three rearing methods revealed associations with characteristic communities: the HP9M group had the highest number of associations, many of which were due to spoilage bacteria, whereas the LP group had the highest number of seasoning -favourable genera.