The main objective of the Action was to increase our knowledge of the biological phenomena involved during the key stages of grape ripening, defence against fungal diseases and resistance to drought, thus allowing significant improvement of viticultural practices during vine development and berry ripening. These objectives require a wide range of expertise and make it necessary to build a project at the European scale. The network to be created was needed to take full advantage of the European geographical space and of its different pedoclimatical conditions. The general strategy was to create an organized network which would generate and organize basic data on vine genomics and vine ecophysiology, comparable to that developed on crops of similar importance (wheat, rice, maize). This network would associate knowhow and expertise from a wide body of researchers including grapevine growers, agronomists, plant physiologists, biochemists, molecular biologists and geneticists. This general strategy could be detailed as follows. (i) to define common measurements and standards, for the assessment of grape development and ripening under various internal (genetic) and external (water status, phytopathogen attacks) constraints. (ii) to collect and to connect all the data and tools concerning the genetical background of rootstocks, scions and expressed sequence tags. (iii) To assess the expression of genes under the conditions defined in (i), in order to find new markers of ripening, and the most relevant genes involved in resistance to biotic (fungal diseases) and abiotic stress (especially drought). These strategies were linked since molecular biology tools could generate considerable information on berry growth and vine response to environment. This would lead to the design of new predictive tools and viticultural practices more friendly to the environment, and to the production of safer wines. The Action would also contribute to the mapping of genes which control grape quality traits. This resource, which was essential for accelerated breeding, was presently critically lacking. It would provide a basis to develop proteomic approaches which may be envisaged as a continuation of this Action. Indeed, protein translation, protein stability and post-translational modifications may play a significant part to alter the final enzymatic activity resulting from gene expression (transcripts). Although several informal contacts had been made with proteomic platforms, the proteomic approach was not an integral part of the present proposal, to allow a better focus and a realistic size, and because the methodological tools were quite different from that of the transcriptomic approaches.
