Mobilizing endogenous transposable elements for grapevine improvement: a genomic and epigenomic approach in New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc

In viticulture, a warming climate can have a very significant impact on grapevine development and therefore on the quality and characteristics of wines across different spatial scales, ranging from global to local. In order to adapt wine-growing to climate change, global climate models can be used to define future scenarios, but only at the scale of major wine regions. Despite the huge progress made over the last ten years in terms of the spatial resolution of climate models (now downscaled to a few square kilometres), they are not yet sufficiently precise to account for the local climate variability associated with such parameters as local topography, in spite of these parameters being decisive for vine and wine characteristics. This study describes a method to downscale future climate scenarios to vineyard scale. Networks of data loggers have been used to collect air temperature at canopy level in the Waipara winegrowing region (New Zealand) over five growing seasons. These measurements allow the creation of fine-scale geostatistical models and maps of temperature (at 100 m resolution) for the growing season. In order to model climate change at pilot site scale, these geostatistical models have been combined with regional climate change predictions for the periods 2031-2050 and 2081-2100 based on the RCP8.5 climate change scenario. The integration of local climate variability with regionalized climate change simulations allows assessment of the impacts of climate change at the vineyard scale. The improved knowledge gained using this methodology results from the increased horizontal resolution that better addresses the concerns of winegrowers. The results provide the local winegrowers with information necessary to understand current processes, as well as historical and future viticulture trends at the scale of their site, thereby facilitating decisions about future response strategies.

Grapevine cultivars are vegetatively propagated to maintain their varietal characteristics. This process of multiplication leads to spontaneous somatic mutations that can eventually generate a variant phenotype, of potential interest for cultivar improvement and innovation. However, regardless their phenotypic effect, somatic mutations stack in the genome, and they can be used to reveal the origin and dissemination history of ancient cultivars. Here, a stringent somatic variant calling over whole genome resequencing data from 35 ‘Tempranillo Tinto’ clones or old vines from seven Iberian winemaking regions revealed 135 single nucleotide variations (SNVs) shared by some of the clonal lines.

Context and purpose of the study. To date over 3,000 grapevine accessions have been collected at Fondazione Edmund Mach (FEM).

Primary and secondary metabolites are major components of grape quality and wine typicity. Their accumulation is interconnected through a complex metabolic network, which is still not well understood. This study aims to investigate how the enzymes of central carbon metabolism interact with anthocyanin biosynthesis during grape berry development: does the accumulation of anthocyanins, which represents a non-negligible diversion of carbon metabolic fluxes, require reprogramming of central enzymes or is it controlled downstream of central metabolism? To this end, 23 enzymes involved in central carbon metabolism pathways have been analyzed in the berries of 3 grape cultivars, which have close genetic background but distinct temporal dynamics of anthocyanin accumulation.

Toasted pruning vine-shoots represent a promising new enological tool for developing wines with chemical and organoleptic high quality, allowing that the resources of the vineyard to be returned to the wine through a “circular process”.