Unlocking Spanish pear genetic diversity: strategies for construction of a national core collection.

Spanish pear germplasm collections are crucial for preservation, research, and breeding efforts. However, genetic diversity and structure is unknown at national level. A coordinated national project analyzed 1251 accessions from 7 Spanish pear collections using an internationally recognized set of 14 SSRs to enhance the utilization of these collections.

Evaluating Treatments for the Protection of Grapevine Pruning Wounds from Natural Infection by Trunk Disease Fungi.

Infection of grapevines by fungal pathogens causing grapevine trunk diseases (GTDs) primarily arises from annual pruning wounds made during the dormant season. While various studies have showcased the efficacy of products in shielding pruning wounds against GTD infections, most of these investigations hinge on artificial pathogen inoculations, which may not faithfully mirror real field conditions. This study aimed to evaluate and compare the efficacy of various liquid formulation fungicides (pyraclostrobin + boscalid) and paste treatments, as well as biological control agents (BCA: SC1, I-1237, and ICC012 + ICC080), for their potential to prevent natural infection of grapevine pruning wounds by trunk disease fungi in two field trials located in Samaniego (Northern Spain) and Madiran (Southern France) over three growing seasons.

Phenotyping xylem connections in grafted plants using X-ray micro-computed tomography.

Plants are able to naturally graft or inosculate their trunks, branches and roots together, this mechanism is used by humans to graft together different genotypes for a range of purposes. Grafts are considered successful if functional vascular connections between the two genotypes occur. Various techniques can evaluate xylem connections across the graft interface.

Intracultivar genetic diversity in grapevine: Water use efficiency variability within cv. Grenache.

The selection of genotypes best adapted to environmental conditions has traditionally focused on agronomic and grape composition parameters. However, to classify the genotypes most adapted to climate change conditions, the aim must be to focus on the ecophysiological responses that will ultimately determine their performance. The variability in water use efficiency of 13 Grenache genotypes over three-seasons was assessed under field conditions at leaf, grape and plant level.

Precision viticulture and advanced analytics. A short review.

Precision viticulture (PV) is a relatively new discipline, whose development started in the 1990s. PV aims at adjusting vineyard management to the spatial variability that naturally appears in the field in order to increase its economic and environmental sustainability. Despite the rapid growth of PV in the last two decades, there is little PV research taking advantage of the great potential advanced analytics could provide to this field.

Genetic diversity of Spanish Prunus domestica L. germplasm reveals a complex genetic structure underlying.

European plum (Prunus domestica L.) is an ancient domesticated species cultivated in temperate areas worldwide whose genetic structure has been scarcely analyzed to date. In this study, a broad representation of Spanish European plum germplasm collected in Northeastern Spain and a representative set of reference cultivars were compared using nuclear and chloroplast markers.

Evaluating the Influence of the Microsatellite Marker Set on the Genetic Structure Inferred in Pyrus communis L.

Fingerprinting information can be used to elucidate in a robust manner the genetic structure of germplasm collections, allowing a more rational and fine assessment of genetic resources. Bayesian model-based approaches are nowadays majorly preferred to infer genetic structure, but it is still largely unresolved how marker sets should be built in order to obtain a robust inference. The objective was to evaluate, in Pyrus germplasm collections, the influence of the SSR marker set size on the genetic structure inferred, also evaluating the influence of the criterion used to select those markers.

Terahertz time domain spectroscopy allows contactless monitoring of grapevine water status.

Agriculture is the sector with the greatest water consumption, since food production is frequently based on crop irrigation. Proper irrigation management requires reliable information on plant water status, but all the plant-based methods to determine it suffer from several inconveniences, mainly caused by the necessity of destructive sampling or of alteration of the plant organ due to contact installation. The aim of this work is to test if terahertz (THz) time domain reflectance measurements made on the grapevine trunk allows contactless monitoring of plant status.

Influence of the freezing method on the changes that occur in grape samples after frozen storage.

Background: Sample freezing is frequently used in oenological laboratories as a compromise solution to increase the number of samples that can be analysed, despite the fact that some grape characteristics are known to change after frozen storage. However, freezing is usually performed using standard freezers, which provide a slow freezing. The aim of this work was to evaluate whether blast freezing would decrease the impact of standard freezing on grape composition.