Abstract
Vitis vinifera (grapevine) is one of the most important fruit crops, both for fresh consumption and wine and spirit production. The term terroir is frequently used in viticulture and the wine industry to relate wine sensory attributes to its geographic origin. Although, it can be cultivated in a wide range of environments, differences in growing conditions have a significant impact on fruit traits that ultimately affect wine quality. Understanding how fruit quality and yield are controlled at a molecular level in grapevine in response to environmental cues has been a major driver of research. Advances in the area of genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics, have significantly increased our knowledge on the abiotic regulation of yield and quality in many crop species, including V. vinifera. The integrated analysis of multiple ‘omics’ can give us the opportunity to better understand how plants modulate their response to different environments. However, ‘omics’ technologies provide a large amount of biological data and its interpretation is not always straightforward, especially when different ‘omic’ results are combined. Here we examine the current strategies used to integrate multi-omics, and how these have been used in V. vinifera. In addition, we also discuss the importance of including epigenomics data when integrating omics data as epigenetic mechanisms could play a major role as an intermediary between the environment and the genome.
Highlights
Grapevine is one of the most economically important fruit crops, and it is largely used for wine production (FAO, 2012)
Random Forest implemented for pathway analysis (Pang et al, 2006), can be used to predict fruit/wine quality traits associated to terroir integrating multi-omic and phenotypic data as shown recently for potato (Acharjee et al, 2016)
Recent work in apple shows how methylation and expression levels of key genes involved in flowering and fruit set are modified by the level of chill received during bud dormancy (Kumar et al, 2016), indicating that the environmentally induced changes observed in fruit quality could be regulated by DNA methylation
Summary
Grapevine is one of the most economically important fruit crops, and it is largely used for wine production (FAO, 2012). Most the chemical compounds that give its unique characteristics to wine are synthesized during berry development (Conde et al, 2007). Terroir is defined as the interactions between the plants, the environment and human factors (Gladstones, 2011) and it is frequently used to relate wine sensory attributes to its geographic origin (Van Leeuwen and Seguin, 2006). The relevance of terroir is still under debate (Anesi et al, 2015), a better understanding of how the environment affects grape berry composition can have a
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