Busted! by Claudia Sonea

The film Sideways was a blockbuster and people loved it. The actors weren't the only ones getting all the credit, the type of grape called Pinot Noir that represented the family heritance in the movie, also become famous. Like all good things, the Pinot Noir had to pass through scientists' experiments and this is how in Italia studies were conducted in order to discover its genetic make-up. On Wednesday more than 2 million genetic variants within the Pinot Noir grape were reported by researchers. This offers a multitude of variants to winegrowers in the hunt for new strains and also leads to hardier vines and cheaper fine wines. Riccardo Velasco, head of genetics at the Istituto Agrario San Michele all'Adige, reinforced the importance of the test adding that the variety at the DNA level gives now the possibility to breed disease-resistant grapes without sacrificing taste. Indeed they are not the first one researching on grapes. Velasco and his team are the first to catalogue the myriad single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs, found scattered amongst its 30,000 genes. Furthermore, it identified a large number of genes related to disease resistance, 289 of which contain SNPs, they reported in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE. One of his benefic effect is fast-tracking the traditional breeding selection process opinions Brian Dilkes of the University of California. Nevertheless, for all those interested in finding out more about cultivating le Pinot Noir, I recommend to read the whole paper at http://www.plosone.org/doi/pone.0001326. Enjoy!

related story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071219/lf_nm_life/genetics_wine_dc;_ylt=AmBv9Gu_w.TtbSxBtQJgbEOs0NUE

by Claudia Sonea for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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