Conventional breeding, genome editing and microbial consortia to enhance sustainability and resilience of grapevine cultivation

In the present PhD thesis, we exploit different complementary approaches for a more sustainable control of grapevine diseases: inheritance of resistance genes, genome-editing to knock-out susceptibility genes and application of plants associated microorganisms to improve plants immunity. In the second chapter a review article describes in detail the most recent biotechnological approaches for crop protection, including genome editing, cisgenesis, RNAi and epigenetics. In the third chapter were reported the activities concern the conventional breeding approach. In this section the elite cv. Glera was crossing with resistant hybrids of different geographical origins. First the offsprings were evaluated for resistance loci presence. Then, eight plants carrying resistant genes to powdery and downy mildews were characterized by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry analyses to provide chemical nature of wine aroma. The fourth chapter described the activities concern the genome-editing application to knock-out susceptibility genes involved in powdery mildew interactions and in general to control the biotrophic pathogenic fungi. In details a novel CRISPR/Cas9 system based on specific recombinase (Cre/loxP) was developed with the aim of removing the ‘entire’ T-DNA cassette. In parallel, a review article about the application of Synthetic Community is presented in Chapter five. Finally, in Chapter six the exploitation of plant immune system is presented. The study aimed at clarifying the effects of arbuscular mycorrhiza priming on the grapevine growth-defence tradeoff.