Cultivation forms and viticulture models adapting to adverse “environmental” conditions

The increasing demand for healthier, more transparent, and sustainable wine products has prompted the need for innovative solutions to optimize the wine health value chain.

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.

Valpolicella is a famous Italian wine-producing region (Paronetto & Dellaglio, 2011), whose main characteristic is the extensive use of the post-harvest withering technique, which takes place in naturally ventilated rooms called ‘fruttai’ (Bellincontro et al., 2016).

The environmental biodiversity is important to guarantee essential services to the living communities, its richness is a symptom of a minor disturbance and improves he environment biological quality.

The optimal climatic conditions of the region were proved in 1867, when a leaf-print of Vitis tokaiensis was found in a stone from miocen age (13 million years ago).