Sativa introgression in Croatian wild grapevine

Abstract

The wild grapevine, Vitis vinifera L. subsp. sylvestris (Gmelin, Hegi), is spontaneous to Europe and has gained increasing scientific attention in recent years due to its rapidly declining populations and its valuable, yet largely unexplored, genetic pool. Over the past few years, considerable efforts have focused on the characterization and evaluation of natural populations, revealing crop-to-wild gene flow from V. vinifera subsp. sativa. In recently published studies, Croatian sylvestris populations have been extensively characterized using SNP markers. Marinov et al. (2024) reported the presence of a domestication-related sativa haplotype associated with white berry colour among 41 individuals from four analysed populations, occurring at a frequency of 21%. In this study, we show relations between white berry haplotype, dioecious flower phenotypes and sativa ancestry estimates reported by Dong et al. (2023). Consistent with most wild grapevine populations, male individuals predominate, representing approximately 60% of the sampled population.

Female individuals showed higher average sativa estimate (19%) than males (14.48%). Despite this, one third of the male individuals carried the white sativa haplotype, including one homozygote, whereas 23.5% of females carried the haplotype exclusively in heterozygous form. The sativa ancestry estimates in these individuals ranged from 2.68% to 62.75%, which suggests that the introgression of recessive sativa alleles originated during the early cultivation of white cultivars and continues to shape wild populations today. This case demonstrates that the introgression of recessive sativa alleles into wild populations—exemplified by the white berry haplotype—often remains undetected by expert prospectors, as these alleles are predominantly present in a heterozygous state or are phenotypically masked by flower dimorphism.

References

Dong et al. 2023

Marinov et al. 2024