Abstract
Koshu is a grape cultivar native to Japan and is one of the country’s most important cultivars for wine making. Koshu and other oriental grape cultivars are widely believed to belong to the European domesticated grape species Vitis vinifera. To verify the domesticated origin of Koshu and four other cultivars widely grown in China and Japan, we genotyped 48 ancestry informative single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and estimated wild and domesticated ancestry proportions. Our principal components analysis (PCA) based ancestry estimation revealed that Koshu is 70% V. vinifera, and that the remaining 30% of its ancestry is most likely derived from wild East Asian Vitis species. Partial sequencing of chloroplast DNA suggests that Koshu’s maternal line is derived from the Chinese wild species V. davidii or a closely related species. Our results suggest that many traditional East Asian grape cultivars such as Koshu were generated from hybridization events with wild grape species.
Highlights
Grapes are one of the most important horticultural crops worldwide, and are typically consumed as fresh fruit or used in the production of wine, brandy, juice and raisins
Samples from the four East Asian wild species (V. amurensis, V. coignetiae, V. ficifolia var. ganebu, and V. shiragai) genotyped as part of this study all clustered with the East Asian wild ancestral population genotyped in [14]
The ancestry of some of the most common East Asian grape cultivars is often claimed to be derived exclusively from the domesticated grape, V. vinifera, which originated in the Caucasus region of Central Asia
Summary
Grapes are one of the most important horticultural crops worldwide, and are typically consumed as fresh fruit or used in the production of wine, brandy, juice and raisins. The majority of wine grapes are cultivars of the domesticated grape V. vinifera, which originated in the Caucasus and spread from there to Europe and eventually to grape growing regions worldwide [1]. Cultivars grown for sale as table grapes or juice are often interspecific hybrids of V. vinifera and wild species (e.g. V_labrusca). Several grape cultivars from China and Japan are widely grown for commercial purposes. Koshu is one of Japan’s most widely planted and popular grape cultivars with approximately 1200 acres under vine in 1997 [3]. It is known for its distinct pale purple skin containing both cyanidin-based and delphinidin-based anthocyanins [4], but not anthocyanin
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