Grapevine stress resilience

     Grapes are the highest valued fruit crop in the United States, but breeding cultivated grapevines for increased yield and quality traits, followed by clonal propagation, has decreased their genetic diversity, making them more susceptible to weather and pathogen pressures.  Crop wild relatives, on the other hand, have gone through natural selection to survive in their changing environments.  By using comparative and functional genomic techniques, the Gschwend Lab identifies genetic variation that provides grapevines and their wild relatives with resilience to abiotic and biotic stress, for integration of these genes into cultivated varieties.  

     We have performed comparative genomic analyses between multiple cultivated and wild grapevines to identify unique genes predicted to confer stress tolerance.  We are further investigating the genetic variation in wild and cultivated grapevines that confer resistance to insect herbivory, cold damage, and fungal pathogens.