Coping with extreme climatic events: some lessons from recent work on grapevine under heat peak

In table grapes seedlessness is a crucial breeding target, mainly results from stenospermocarpy, linked to the Thompson Seedless variety. Several studies investigated the genetic control of seedlessness identifying AGL11, a MADS-box transcription factor, as a crucial gene.
We performed a deep investigation of the whole AGL11 gene sequence in a collection of grapevine varieties revealing three different promoter-CDS combinations. By investigating the expression of the three AGL11 alleles and evaluating their ability to activate the promoter region, we show that AGL11 regulates its transcription in a specific promoter-CDS manner. By a multi-AGL11 co-expression analysis we identified a methyl jasmonate esterase, an indole-3-acetate beta-glucosyltransferase, and an isoflavone reductase as top AGL11 candidate targets. In vivo experiments further confirmed AGL11 role in regulating these genes, demonstrating its significant influence in seed development and thus in seedlessness trait.

An emblematic name of the burgundy wine region, a few kilometers from dijon, gevrey-chambertin stands out as a small wine town of international renown in the heart of a prestigious red wine vineyard listed as a unesco world heritage site.

Today, there is need to design, produce and label terroir wines, with unique organoleptic properties and more “attractive to consumers”. For this purpose, two Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast strains (Sa and Sb) isolated during spontaneous fermentations were used for white wine production from the Assyrtiko grape of Santorini. A third commercial strain was used as control.

Quercetin precipitation has become an increasingly common issue in red wine, often resulting in visually unpleasant sediments and diminished product quality.

The appearance of the Phylloxera pest in the 19th century in Europe caused dramatical damages in grapevine diversity. To mitigate these losses, grapevine growers resorted to using crosses of different Vitis species, such as 110 Richter (110R) (V. berlandieri x V. rupestris), which has been invaluable for studying adaptations to stress responses in vineyards. Recently, a high quality chromosome scale assembly of 110R was released, but the available gene models were predicted without using as evidence transcriptional sequences obtained from roots, that are crucial organs in rootstock, and they may express certain genes exclusively. Therefore, we employed RNA sequencing reads of 110R roots under different stress conditions to predict new gene models in each haplotype of 110R under different stresses.