March 3 () –
The largest genetic analysis ever conducted on grape varieties, provide new insights into how, when and where wine and table vines were domesticated.
“This work represents a huge international collaborative effort, difficult to do under any circumstances, but especially considering that we have carried it out during the COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns,” said Wei Chen, Agricultural University. of Yunnan/Yunnan Research Institute for Local Plateau Agriculture and Industry (China) and study author, published in the journal ‘Science’.
Although wine and grapes are culturally very important, it has been difficult to confirm when and where wine and table vines were domesticated. This is largely due to the fact that there have been no sufficiently extensive genetic sequencing analyzes on grape varieties.
As a result, there are several hypotheses in the literature that remain uncertain. For example, researchers have thought that the cultivated wine vine (‘Vitis vinifera’) had a single domestication in western Asia, from which all wine varieties derive, and that it occurred before the advent of agriculture. They have also thought that the wine vine was cultivated before the table grape vine.
Now new research refutes both ideas. Based on the extensive grapevine genetic data studied, their report shows that there were two episodes of domestication of the cultivated wine vine in two different locations — Western Asia and the Caucasus region — separated during the last glacial advance.
“Despite being separated by more than 1,000 kilometers, the two domestication processes appear to have occurred contemporaneously with a high degree of shared selection signatures on the same genes,” writes Robin Allaby of the University of Warwick (UK) in a related perspective.
In addition, they demonstrated that these domestication processes they took place 11,000 years ago, in line with the advent of agriculture and about 4,000 years later than some studies indicated. The genetic data also suggests that wine and table grapes were grown at the same time, and not wine vine first.
The authors also identify some genes that are involved in the domestication of the grape –improving flavor, color and texture– and that could help winemakers improve current wine and make varieties more resistant to climate change and other stress factors.
Among their findings, they discover more about the genetics underlying the color of the white grape and the ancient muscatel flavor; at least one allele underlying muscatel flavor may be detrimental to plant healththey affirm.
To carry out this work, the researchers generated a high-quality reference genome at the chromosomal level of the parent wild grapevine ‘Vitis sylvestris’. They then resequenced more than 3,000 individual grapevine plant samples collected from wide geographic locations, both wild and from private collections.
“Our collaborators turned to their contacts and looked for old and local varieties,” Chen explains. “For example, many of the samples from Armenia from old vineyards turned out to be undocumented varieties.”
