Vitis rotundifolia Raw sequence reads. Vitis rotundifolia

Muscadinia rotundifolia is closely related to Vitis and shows high levels of resistance to a wide spectrum of grapevine diseases. The identification, cloning and characterisation of the putative disease resistance genes present in M. rotundifolia would be crucial for breeding for disease resistance in grapevine. The main goal of this project is to accelerate the functional characterization of the resistance to several grapevine pathogens found in M. rotundifolia. To achieve this goal, a step of development of resources for the analysis and exploitation of the syntheny between V. vinifera and M. rotundifolia is required.This project exploits the sequence of the grapevine genome to identify genes of interest in a related species. The project relies in the combined use on one side, of comparative genetic mapping between V. vinifera and M. rotundifolia, and on the other side, of the anchoring of a M. rotundifolia BAC library into the V. vinifera sequence. This strategy will result in the identification of the M. rotundifolia BAC clones corresponding to the genomic regions harbouring the clusters of candidate disease resistance genes, which are expected to be in synthenic position. An important aspect of this project is that it will overcome the need for classical map-based cloning of resistance genes.This project is the first step towards the creation of a collection of transgenic grapevine lines expressing each one of the candidate resistance genes from M. rotundifolia. Taking into consideration that M. rotundifolia shows high levels of resistance to a wide range of grapevine pathogens, such collection will be a precious tool for the identification of resistance genes against already known diseases but also potentially against diseases that may be introduced in the future, especially in relation with the climate change.