New Tool Shows the Genetics of Grape-Growing

Researchers from the University of Adelalde have uncovered a new web-based tool that's unlocked the complex secrets behind grapevine development.

For their study, they examined how almost 30,000 genes that actually work together in groups to produce the vines and grapes itself.

"The complexity of plants is easily overlooked when we're enjoying a glass of wine," said project leader Associate Professor Christopher Ford at the University's School of Agriculture, Food and Wine, via a press release. "But every part of the vine and the grape, each final attribute of flavour, colour and aroma, their ability to resist pests and adapt to salinity, all of these represent the outcomes of the coordinated expression - switching on or off - of sometimes thousands of individual genes, each encoding some small component of the final product.

"If we know the identity of these genes, and the patterns in which they are turned on and off, we will be better able to understand how their expression leads to these complex outcomes."

Lead study author Darren Wong and post-doctoral researchers Crystal Sweetman and Damian Drew discussed how genes were turned on at the same time and work together to form the fruit.

"For example, if we know there is a gene that is responsible for making an enzyme which is critical at a particular stage of grape production, then this tool will enable us to see which other genes are switched on in the grape at the same time," Ford adds, via the release. "By clustering genes based on patterns of this 'co-expression' it's possible to identify not just the genes we expected to be involved but others whose roles in a particular function we didn't suspect.

"In this way we can build up networks of identified genes that we can say are working together under certain conditions, and see which ones may be important, for instance, in helping the plant cope with drought or salinity."

According to background information from the study, this database, known as VTCdb, is freely available for both researchers and grapevine breeders.

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More information regarding the study can be found via the journal BMC Genomics.