Comparison of the chemical diversity of Vitis rotundifolia and Vitis vinifera cv. ‘Cabernet Sauvignon’

Abstract

Grapevine is one of the most important fruit plants in the world, mainly due to its grapes and related products, with a highly economic and cultural importance. Every year, vineyards are affected by several pathogen outbreaks and the only way to control them is through preventive applications of agrochemicals every 12 to 15 days. This approach is not sustainable and not always effective. The Vitis genus comprise different species that exhibit varying levels of resistance to pathogens, thus the understanding of the innate resistance/susceptibility mechanisms of these different Vitis species is crucial to cope with these threats. In this work, an untargeted metabolomics approach was followed, using Fourier transform-ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry (FT-ICR-MS), to analyse the metabolic chemical diversity of two Vitis species: Vitis rotundifolia (resistant to pathogens) and V. vinifera cv. ‘Cabernet Sauvignon’ (susceptible to pathogens). Chemical formulas from both Vitis were used to build Van Krevelen diagrams and compositional space plots, which do not require full metabolite identification and provide an easy comparison method. Based only on these visualization tools, it was shown that the V. rotundifolia metabolome is more complex than the metabolome of V. vinifera cv. ‘Cabernet Sauvignon’. Moreover, the regions that present a higher density are associated to lipids, polyketides and carbohydrates. Also, V. rotundifolia metabolome presented a higher ratio O/C compounds.