Global assessment of grapevine microbiome function to promote sustainable vineyard management

Vineyards are integral to supporting the ecology and economy for a sustainable society, as they cover a large portion of land worldwide, and represent an important source of income for local economies.

The intensification of viticulture including the excessive use of plowing and agrochemicals has resulted in eroded and biologically impoverished vineyards with associated negative consequences for growers and the environment.

Given these challenges, we must now work to restore sustainable biodiversity and ecosystem function while increasing the margin of benefits for growers.

An important step in this process is to investigate the functional microbiome associated with grapevine roots and leaves because it controls key processes such as pathogenesis, symbiosis and nutrient cycling.

To do so, a global collaborative research network has begun to identify the members of the grapevine microbiome (bacteria, fungi and micro-fauna); the proposed research project (FUNVINE) would complement microbial community analyses by simultaneously characterizing the microbial functional attributes of grapevines worldwide using advanced shotgun metagenomic approaches.

FUNVINE will include two major research components to improve our knowledge to help achieve sustainability in vineyard management; 1) global-scale functional profiling of the grapevine microbiome, and 2) manipulative experimentation to identify the impacts of environmental change on grapevine-microbiome interactions.

These research objectives will expand global knowledge of the microbial mechanisms that benefit or inhibit grapevines across environmental gradients, including under a major climate change-driven stressor -- drought.

Overall, the FUNVINE project will reveal for the first time, the mechanisms of the grapevine microbiome across regions, environmental gradients, and grape varieties, thus providing answers to many of the greatest challenges to healthy, productive, and sustainable viticulture systems worldwide.