Developmental and genetic mechanisms underlying seedlessness in grapevine somatic variants
Abstract
Seedless table grapes are greatly appreciated for fresh and dry consumption. There is also some interest in seedless winegrapes, because the combination of lower fruit set, smaller berries with higher skin/pulp ratio and looser bunches with the absence of seeds in crushed berries, a possible source of astringent tannins, might also have favorable effects on wine quality. The gene VviAGL11 has been shown to play a central role in stenospermocarpy in Sultanina, but the molecular bases of other sources of stenospermocarpy as well as of parthenocarpy have not been clarified yet. To help fill this gap, a genetic and phenotypic characterization of seedless somatic variants from other cultivars has been undertaken, with special emphasis on a parthenocarpic Sangiovese mutant known as Corinto Nero.
In vitro pollen germination tests, in vivo pollination trials, histological observation of female gametophyte development, and genetic analysis of seedlings have shown that Corinto Nero is incapable of forming seeds probably due to meiotic anomalies.
In addition to a pairwise transcriptomic comparison between the mutant and the seeded wild-type, we present here a comparative genomic analysis between Corinto Nero and 10 seeded clones of Sangiovese based on short-read resequencing to identify sequence and structural variation that may reveal candidate genes for parthenocarpy in Corinto Nero.
DOI:
Issue: Open GPB 2024
Type: Article
Authors
1 Research and Innovation Centre, Fondazione Edmund Mach, San Michele all’Adige (Trento), Italy
2 Center Agriculture Food Environment (C3A), University of Trento, San Michele all’Adige (Trento), Italy
3 Departamento de Viticultura, Instituto de Ciencias de la Vid y del Vino (CSIC, UR, Gobierno de la Rioja), Logroño, Spain
4 Department of Genetics and Cytology, Yerevan State University, Yerevan, Armenia
5 Department of Physics, University of Trento, Povo (Trento), Italy
6 Istituto di Genomica Applicata, Udine, Italy
7 Department of Agricultural, Food, Environmental and Animal Sciences, University of Udine (Udine), Italy
8 Center of Desert Agriculture, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Thuwal, Makkah, Saudi Arabia
9 Institute for Sustainable Plant Protection – Research Council of Italy, Grugliasco (Torino), Italy
§ Equally contributed