Telomere length as a genomic biomarker of well-being in grapevines: current progress in a multi-year study on Aglianico under varying water conditions

Abstract

Telomere length is emerging as a fast, sensitive, and cost-effective genomic biomarker for assessing stress exposure and physiological status in plants. In grapevines (Vitis vinifera L.), it offers an integrative approach to monitor plant well-being under diverse environmental conditions, with strong potential for large-scale and routine use in vineyard management.

Building on prior work establishing a PCR-based method to measure telomere length in the Aglianico cultivar, this study expands the analysis over two consecutive growing seasons. The aim is to evaluate telomere dynamics in relation to water availability, under consistent soil and management conditions, in a high-quality wine production area of southern Italy (Taurasi DOCG, Tenuta Donna Elvira, Montemiletto—AV).

While standardized telomere measurement protocols are well established in mammalian systems, they remain scarce in viticulture. Our approach uses species-specific primers and a stable reference gene to quantify relative telomere length via digital PCR (dPCR), with the goal of linking genomic signals to environmental stress exposure.

This contribution presents results from two consecutive years of telomere length analysis conducted on the same Aglianico vines, providing new insights into their temporal response to varying water availability. These findings represent a further step toward the use of telomere length as a practical biomarker for vineyard monitoring plant health, supporting precision agriculture strategies, such as targeted irrigation and optimized resource management, and generating detailed vineyard maps of plant health and vigor, with broad applications in viticulture and terroir analysis.