RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Environmental conditions and agronomic practices induce consistent global changes in DNA methylation patterns in grapevine (Vitis vinifera cv Shiraz) JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 127977 DO 10.1101/127977 A1 Huahan Xie A1 Moumouni Konate A1 Na Sai A1 Kiflu Gebremicael Tesfamicael A1 Timothy Cavagnaro A1 Matthew Gilliham A1 James Breen A1 Andrew Metcalfe A1 Roberta DeBei A1 Cassandra Collins A1 Carlos Marcelino Rodriguez Lopez YR 2017 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/04/29/127977.abstract AB Fruit attributes that affect wine quality are thought to be largely driven by the interaction of grapevine’s genetic characteristics with environmental factors (i.e. climate, soil and topography) and vineyard management. All these variables, in conjunction with the wine making process, give a wine its distinctive character. Understanding how grapevines perceive and adapt to a changing environment will provide us with an insight into how to better manage crop quality. Mounting evidence suggests that epigenetic mechanisms are a key interface between the environment and the genotype that ultimately affect the plant’s phenotype. Moreover, it is now widely accepted that epigenetic mechanisms are a source of useful variability during crop varietal selection that could affect crop performance. While the contribution of DNA methylation to plant performance has been extensively studied in other major crops, very little work has been done in grapevine. Here we used Methylation Sensitive Amplified Polymorphisms to obtain global patterns of DNA methylation, and to identify the main drivers of epigenetic diversity across 22 vineyards planted with the cultivar Shiraz in six distinctive wine areas of a major wine zone, The Barossa, South Australia. The observed epigenetic profiles showed a high level of differentiation that grouped vineyards by their area of provenance despite the low genetic differentiation between vineyards and sub-regions. Furthermore, pairwise epigenetic distances between vineyards with similar management systems showed a significant correlation with geographic distance. Finally, methylation sensitive Genotyping By Sequencing identified 3,598 differentially methylated genes that were assigned to 1,144 unique GO terms of which 8.6% were associated with response to environmental stimulus. Taken together, our results indicate that the intensity and directionality of DNA methylation differentiation between vineyards and wine sub-regions within The Barossa are driven by management and local growing conditions. Finally, we discuss how epigenetic variability can be used as a tool to understand and potentially modulate terroir in grapevine.