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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Fungal ecology on grapes

subject

description

Microbial population of grapes is important from a technological point of view because it determines the quality of wine. But few studies have focused on fungal populations of grapes. A better knowledge of the fungal diversity on grapes, particularly as concerns species responsible for wine defects, may help efforts to control their development.We report the development of a PCR ITS-RFLP method as a fast and easy technique for identifying species of fungal genera present on grapes. By this methode, 41 different fungal species among 43 studied species belonging to 11 genera were characterized at the species level. Only P. thomii remained indistinguishable from P. glabrum. Using this PCR-ITS-RFLP, 96.3% strains tested could be differentiated to the species level with only four enzymes and 41.5% only with two enzymes. Moreover this work has contributed to the enriching of the database of fungal ITS sequences.Thus 199 isolated strain were on grapes in Burgundy vineyard were chacacterized at species level indepdantly of the genus by this method. P. spinolusum was the most frequently isolated species of Penicillium in Burgundy for 2008 vintage. Paralelly, the quantification of Botrytis cinerea, used as model, was developped by qPCR. The assay contained an internal amplification control to compensate for variations in DNA extraction and the various compounds from grapes, had high efficiency and the limit of detection was estimated to be 6.3 pg DNA (corresponding to 540 spores). This method was applied to assess the effects of various treatment strategies against Botrytis in the vineyard and demonstrates the importance of the prophylactic method.