Resumen de Italian wild grapevine: A state of the art on germplasm and conservation in 2010; the year of biodiversity
B. Biagini, Serena Imazio, G. De Lorenzis, Attilio Scienza, Osvaldo Failla, Emanuele Quattrini
Vitis vinifera subsp. sylvestris Gmel. is the wild progenitor of cultivated grapevine. In some countries, wild grapevines are considered on the brink of extinction. In 2006 the Italian Ministry of Environment funded a research project aiming to create a germplasm collection of wild grapevines pooled from existing Italian populations. In a two-year period, woody cuttings of 748 plants were collected and 246 among these are already in collection at the Cinque Terre National Park in Liguria, whose territory was designated a UNESCO world heritage site for its landscape agriculture and for the need to preserve its cultural, environmental, local and historical values. Samples collected have been genotyped at 20 SSR loci both to have a correct fingerprint of all the accessions and to check for possible mistakes during samplings. The ex situ collection is available for researchers interested in the study of the genetic structure of wild grapevine, both for population genetics and for studies regarding gene diversity.
