Port wine region settling

Context and purpose. The vine is a holobiont, where the plant interacts positively, negatively, and neutrally with microbes that together form the vine’s microbiome.

Viticultural management regimes influence the soil elemental profile of a vineyard, determining the microbial community distribution, insect life, and plant biochemistry and physiology

Bentonite fining is commonly used in oenology to remove all or parts of white wine proteins, which are known to be involved in haze formation. This fining is effective, but has disadvantages: it is not selective, thus molecules responsible for aroma are also removed, it causes substantial volume losses, and finally it generates wastes. Over the last decades, the knowledge of wine proteins has increased: they have been identified, their structures are known, some of them have been crystallized.

Historical terrace vineyards are simultaneously impressive documents of the human inclination to design, sites for the production of high quality wines and habitats for a rich variety of flora and fauna

Conventional molecular analyses provide bulk genomic/transcriptomic data that are unable to reveal the cellular heterogeneity and to precisely define how gene networks orchestrate organ development. We will profile gene expression and identify open chromatin regions at the individual cells level, allowing to define cell-type specific regulatory elements, developmental trajectories and transcriptional networks orchestrating organ development and function. We will perform scRNA-seq and snATAC-seq on leaf/berry protoplasts and nuclei and combine them with the leaf/berry bulk tissues obtained results, where the analysis of transcripts, chromatin accessibility, histone modification and transcription factor binding sites showed that a large fraction of phenotypic variation appears to be determined by regulatory rather than coding variation and that many variants have an organ-specific effect.