The cultivated grapevine (Vitis vinifera ssp. vinifera) is one of the world’s most economically important fruit crops and a flagship model for plant genomics. Portugal, in particular, represents a major hotspot of grapevine diversity, harboring a remarkable richness of traditional wine varieties. Recent advances in whole-genome sequencing have generated unprecedented genomic resources, enabling researchers to investigate the evolutionary history of grapevine across its native and cultivated range.
In this seminar, I will present part of my PhD research on grapevine domestication using whole-genome resequencing approaches. Our findings support a scenario in which a primary domestication event was followed by extensive post-domestication hybridization between cultivated grapevines and local wild populations across Western Europe. The strongest genomic signatures of introgression were identified in Iberian wine varieties, which retain large genomic regions inherited from wild relatives. Further analyses revealed that many of the introgressed regions overlap with loci previously targeted by natural selection in wild populations from the Iberian Peninsula. These results suggest that adaptive introgression contributed to the transfer of advantageous traits related to environmental adaptation, shaping the evolution and resilience of modern grapevine varieties.
I will also introduce the GrapeGen project, a collaborative initiative between BIOPOLIS-CIBIO and IRD/DIADE. Leveraging newly sequenced Portuguese grapevine genomes and a curated dataset of hundreds of cultivated and wild genomes from across Europe and the Mediterranean, GrapeGen aims to clarify the geographic origins and frequency of introgression events and to evaluate the pivotal role of the Iberian Peninsula in the evolutionary history of grapevine.
