ABSTRACT
Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, MS 330, University of Nevada, Reno, Nevada 89557-0330, USA. *Corresponding author: jcushman@unr.edu
The berries of grapevine (Vitis vinifera L.) and related species are among the most widely grown and economically most import fruit crops in the world. Since the initial domestication of the grapevine more than 7000 years ago (Arroyo-Garcia et al. 2006; This et al. 2006), its berries have been used for wine production, as well as grape juice, table grapes, raisins, and more recently for leaf, seed, and skin extracts by the nutraceutical and cosmetic industries (Iriti and Faoro 2006; Monagas et al. 2006). Given its international importance as a fruit crop, intensive functional genomics investigations of grapevine have focused mainly on understanding the complex transcriptional regulatory hierarchy controlling developmental and tissue-specifi c gene expression patterns at nearly all stages of berry development, and on biotic and abiotic stress-specifi c responses in leaf, root, and berry tissues.
