A knowledge base for Vitis vinifera functional analysis

Alfredo Pulvirenti, Rosalba Giugno, Rosario Distefano, Giuseppe Pigola, Misael Mongiovi, Girolamo Giudice, Vera Vendramin, Alessandro Lombardo, Federica Cattonaro, Alfredo Ferro

Vitis vinifera (Grapevine) is the most important fruit species in the modern world. Wine and table grapes sales contribute significantly to the economy of major wine producing countries. The most relevant goals in wine production concern quality and safety. In order to significantly improve the achievement of these objectives and to gain biological knowledge about cultivars, a genomic approach is the most reliable strategy. The recent grapevine genome sequencing offers the opportunity to study the potential roles of genes and microRNAs in fruit maturation and other physiological and pathological processes. Although several systems allowing the analysis of plant genomes have been reported, none of them has been designed specifically for the functional analysis of grapevine genomes of cultivars under environmental stress in connection with microRNA data. Here we introduce a novel knowledge base, called BIOWINE, designed for the functional analysis of Vitis vinifera genomes of cultivars present in Sicily. The system allows the analysis of RNA-seq experiments of two different cultivars, namely Nero d'Avola and Nerello Mascalese. Samples were taken under different climatic conditions of phenological phases, diseases, and geographic locations. The BIOWINE web interface is equipped with data analysis modules for grapevine genomes. In particular users may analyze the current genome assembly together with the RNA-seq data through a customized version of GBrowse. The web interface allows users to perform gene set enrichment by exploiting third-party databases. BIOWINE is a knowledge base implementing a set of bioinformatics tools for the analysis of grapevine genomes. The system aims to increase our understanding of the grapevine varieties and species of Sicilian products focusing on adaptability to different climatic conditions, phenological phases, diseases, and geographic locations.