Prefazione. Preface. Prefacio

“Microgreens: novel fresh and functional food to explore all the value of biodiversity” (MicroGREENS) is a project funded by the Italian Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (Mipaaf - Decree n. 93824 of December, 30th 2014), according to article 9 of the announcement of the public selection for the provision of funds to finance projects in the field of agriculture, food, forestry, fishing and aquaculture related to the goals of Expo Milano 2015. The project was born from the cooperation between the Association ‘ORTINNOVA’ and some researchers of the Department of Agricultural and Environmental Science of the University of Bari ‘Aldo Moro’. The project MicroGREENS aims to broadcast and increase the public awareness on the importance and value of the great heritage of biodiversity of the Italian and Apulian vegetables, revealing how such richness can be exploited to develop novel, fresh, functional and high value food products such as microgreens.