Response to powdery and downy mildew of varieties with disease resistance genes (PIWI)

Climate change and environmental degradation are existential threats to europe and the world. One of the most important objectives is to reduce by 2030 the use and the risk of chemical pesticides and fertilisers, reducing nutrient losses and increasing organic farming. Grapevine (vitis spp.) is one of the major and most economically important fruit crops worldwide. It is characterised by high levels of genetic diversity, as result of natural genetic mutations, which are common in grapevines and further assisted by ongoing vegetative propagation.

Aims: This work summarizes some of the upmost recent studies and valorization strategies concerning the Prosecco wine production area. After the geographical denomination Prosecco (DO) was strongly reformed in 2009, the newborn DOCG (controlled and guaranteed DO) and DOC (controlled DO) areas have required different and specific strategies to promote and protect the value of their production.

Reduction of sulfur dioxide during winemaking is a request from the wine industry. To replace sulfur dioxide, various alternatives exist, including bioprotection by yeast inoculation. This practice consists in adding non-Saccharomyces yeasts directly on the grapes or must.

Soil physical and chemical properties affect vine nutrition, as indicated by leaf and petiole nutrient content, in a way that may directly impact wine properties.

Fermenting grape juice represents one of the oldest continuously maintained anthropogenic microbial environments and supports a well-mapped microbial ecosystem. Several yeast and bacterial species dominate this ecosystem, and some of these species are part of the globally most studied and best understood individual organisms. Detailed physiological, cellular and molecular data have been generated on these individual species and have helped elucidate complex evolutionary processes such as the domestication of wine yeast strains of the species Saccharomyces cerevisiae. These data support the notion that the wine making environment represents an ecological niche of significant evolutionary relevance. Taken together, the data suggest that the wine fermentation ecosystem is an excellent model to study fundamental questions about the working of microbial ecosystems and on the impact of biotic selection pressures on microbial ecosystem functioning. Indeed, and although well mapped, the rules and molecular mechanisms that govern the interactions between microbial species within this, and other, ecosystems remain underexplored. Here we present data derived from several converging approaches, including microbiome data of spontaneous fermentations, the population dynamics of constructed consortia, the application of biotic selection pressures in directed laboratory evolution, and the physiological and molecular analysis of pairwise and higher order interactions between yeast species. The data reveal the importance of cell wall-related elements in interspecies interactions and in evolutionary adaptation and suggest that predictive modelling and biotechnological control of the wine ecosystem during fermentation are promising strategies for wine making in future.