New Breeding approaches to improve mildew resistance in wine grape cultivars.

Supervisor: Dr. Velasco Riccardo (CREA-VE)

Grapevine is one of the most important crops in the world. It being used to production of wine grapes, sparkling, table grapes and raisin production. However, the main cultivars of V. vinifera shows low resistance to pathogens, that causes an important loss of production. To oppose the loss of grapes many pesticides applications are required, making the viticulture one of the agricultural activities with the greatest chemical input. To reduce the use of environmentally-impacting fungicides, many strategies are currently developed such as classical breeding to introduce resistance genes or New Plant Breeding Technologies (NPBTs).

Feasible methods for plants transformation include agroinfiltration via Agrobacterium tumefaciens, direct gene transfer into protoplasts (direct delivery). Breeding strategy for resistance to pathogens can be achieve by knocking-out plant susceptibility-genes through genome
editing approach or alternatively introducing resistance genes by cisgenic approach.

In this project New Plant Breeding Technologies will be used to increase Plasmopara viticola and/or Erysiphe necator resistance in some economically important V. vinifera cultivars: a genome editing approach via CRISPR/Cas will be used to obtain no transgenic lines with either silenced susceptibility genes or introgressed resistance genes.

Biography and Contacts

Loredana Moffa was born in 1991 in Campobasso, Italy. In 2016 she obtain her degree in Biological Science at University of Molise, in the same year she transfer to Ferrara for study Industrial Biotechnologies where she achieved in 2018 a Master Degree (110/110 cum Laude) spending her final research internship at ‘Edmund Mach Foundation’ studying a genome editing approach via CRISPR/Cas9 to knock-out susceptibility gene to Erysiphe necator. In 2018 she started a PhD at ‘Agricultural Science and Biotechnologies’ of the University of Udine and her currently carrying her project at CREA-VE (Conegliano-TV).

Contacts:

E-mail: moffa.loredana@spes.uniud.it, loredana.moffa@crea.gov.it

Phone: +39 0438 73264