Molecular characterization of the grapevine germplasm collection held at the Fondazione Edmund Mach

Growing scientific interest in the genetic diversity of grapevine, together with the need to improve the organization of conserved materials and streamline manage-ment costs has given rise to a project aimed at characterizing all the germplasm maintained by FEM-IASMA. In an initial molecular analysis, one plant of each accession was tested at 10 microsatellite loci (SSR). Comparison of the profiles obtained allowed the genotypes present to be identified and hence the number of accessions to undergo further investigation to be reduced. The extension of genotyping to 12 other SSR loci confirmed the consistency of the collection's gene pool. Using assignment experiments, comparisons with international databases and ampelographic verification, grape cultivars with the same SSR profile are attributed to cases of synonymy or denomination errors. The most interesting phenotypic variations amongst plants with an identical SSR genotype will be selected for conservation. The set of accessions with a non-redundant genotype is the collection's main source of genetic diversity. Regarding this material, intense genotyping of hundreds of SNP loci is underway in order to identify appropriate core collections for future association studies. Some of the characteristics emerging from this study and other evaluations of the collection's contents are presented