Grape Transcriptomics and Viticulture

A major goal of viticulture is to exert control over ripening and produce fruit of reproducible yield and quality. This implies developing effective viticultural practices, breeding cultivars with improved characteristics, and requires considering the numerous variables that can influence development and ripening, like cultivar-specific traits, regional climate, and stresses. Molecular tools aid these efforts. Among them, transcriptome measurements that capture expression across the genome allow monitoring which genomic features are transcribed given the aforementioned variables. The technologies used to study the transcriptome have rapidly improved and become less expensive since the early 2000s, increasing the feasibility of developing molecular marker-driven practices. This chapter briefly reviews the history and state of transcriptomic technologies since they have been applied to grapevine, reviews the seminal publications that have used these tools, and proposes a direction for this field in the future