Evidence of a secondary grapevine domestication centre detected by SSR analysis.

The origin of the grapevine was investigatedwith archaeobotanical, cultural and historical data. Aprimary domestication centre was located in the Near Eastregion but there is no agreement on the existence or roleof secondary domestication centres. In this work, PCRbasedmicrosatellite analysis has been applied to study theorigin of some Italian cultivated grapevines from in situdirect domestication of the wild autoctonous grapevine.Three different Italian locations in Grosseto, Cosenza andNuoro were identified for this study, and domesticatedgrapevine as well as wild local accessions growing inthese location, were analysed by SSR markers. Clusteranalysis performed on Cosenza and Grosseto samplesshowed a high value of genetic distance between domesticatedand wild accessions. On the contrary two cultivars(Bovale Murru and Bovale Muristellu) recovered inNuoro (in the Sardinia island) were very close to somewild varieties. This suggests that the latter two cultivarsmay have originated from wild grapevines and consequentlythat in this location a secondary grapevinedomestication event occurred. Six Lambrusco varietieswere also included in this analysis as ancient putativeancestors of the cultivated grapevines. The molecularanalysis excluded this hypothesis and suggest Lambruscoas an independent Vitis taxon.