ABSTRACT
The cultivated grapevine, Vitis vinifera L., is a crop of high economic value. Grape berries are eaten fresh, dried, canned, as juice or jam, but their main use is in the winemaking. Several Bacterial Artificial Chromosome libraries are available in grape, opening the roads for structural genomics in this species. The growing emergence of genomic resources in grape and several preliminary studies showing the high level of haplotypic sequence divergence, have allowed the production of alternative strategies that are under discussion for the sequencing of the grape genome. Grapevine cultivars are highly heterozygous with an average PIC value of Single nucleotide polymorphisms -based haplotypes of 0.61 and an average heterozygosity of Simple Sequence Repeat markers of 0.77 to 0.82. The grapevine genome thus consists of two very different haplotypes. The tool box of the grapevine scientific community could be considerably improved by the discovery of a dwarf mutant showing precocious and generalized floral induction.
