Bisulfite sequencing of Wild and Cultivated grapevines (Vitis vinifera L.). Domestication process caused different methylation strategies in grapevine

Domestication process in grapevine helped us to fix the characters of interest in the plant along the history (berry size, sugar content, e. g.). Thanks to the vegetative propagation of grapevine by cuttings, these genotypes could be preserved easier than using sexual reproduction. However, in spite of the use of vegetative propagation in grapevine, different phenotypes often appeared in the same vineyard. To explain this effect, the advances in epigenomic knowledge in plants could explain these variations by different epialleles that could produce that phenotypic variance. However, the appearance of these epialleles could have a big influence in the domestication of grapevine along the history. The present study aimed to explore how the domestication process influenced the methylation strategy in cultivated grapevines. For that, a Reduced-Representation Bisulphite Sequencing (RRBS) were performed on 10 cultivar varieties and 8 wild accessions, finding out that cultivated grapevines contained higher methylation level in all methylation contexts than wild grapevines.