Exploring high throughput secondary trait phenomics to improve grapevine breeding

Bunch rot is one of the main causes of grape quality losses, especially in rainy summers.

Phenolic compounds are released from the wood into the wine spirit (WS) during the ageing process, and are of utmost importance to the colour, flavour, taste and the overall quality acquired by this spirit drink.1 Their concentrations in the WS and the related effects mainly depend on the kind of wood (oaks vs chestnut), toasting level and ageing technology (traditional using wooden barrels vs alternative).1,2,3

The wine industry is currently on the search for new aromas and less browning in their products. In the improvement process of wine, lower fermentation temperatures have been considered, however, the yeasts in the market cannot tolerate such temperatures

Retrotransposons, particularly of the Ty-Copia and Ty-Gypsy superfamilies, represent the most abundant and widespread transposons in many plant genomes. Grapevine is no exception and it is clear that these mobile elements have played a major role in the evolution of Vitaceae genomes. While speculation abounds around the possible role of transposons in plant genomes, outside of the rather obvious involvement of retrotransposition in fueling genome expansion, there is little clarity of the actual role these elements have in both developing new genetic variation and in modulating epigenetic responses within genomes to changing climate. To this end we have been exploring de-novo assembled Sauvignon blanc and Pinot noir genomes with a view to catalogue retrotransposon loci to determine the structural intactness and thus age of insertion variation across a small number of clonal linages of these 2 varietals in an attempt to identify ‘live’ TE loci.

The knowledge of the influence of soil conditions on the effects that different plant densities provoke in the agronomic grapevine behaviour becomes very interesting since it allows to focus the vineyard management on the optimization of the natural, hydric and human resources.