What benefits can viticulture possibly expect from genomics?

Grapevine is a major crop for French agriculture. In order to increase its competitiveness and to adapt its production to the new constraints arising from the climatic changes, the occurence of new diseases, the necessity to protect the environment and from consumer demands, gaining a better knowledge of its physiological characteristics and behaviour within its own environment is imperative. To that end, genomic resources have recently been developped under the auspices of the International Grape Genome Program consortium (www.vitaceae.org:8080) which was created in 2001. The grapevine genome is currently being sequenced within the framework of a public Franco-Italian project (www.cns.fr). The availability of the genome will considerably facilitate the transfer of knowledge from model species to vine while taking its biological specificities into account. It will also allow the development of high throughput functional genomic approaches whose efficiency is proven for the study of complex traits in other species. It will be possible to integrate-based these genomic tools into such other approaches as genetic or physiology approaches aiming at developing efficient marker-assisted selection strategies for the development of resistant varieties for example, or for designing models for predicting the behaviour of the plant in the field for greater sustainability. Important problems, Such as the development of a set of tools for validating the function of the gene in the biological system of the vine as well as the bioinformatic integration of the resulting data into predictive models, are still to be solved by the scientific Community. Finally, it is important to organize the tender call and funding policy in such a way as to allow the long-term development of efficient research activities in both the private and public sectors.