Genetic diversity and geographical distribution of wild Saccharomyces cerevisiae strains from the wine-producing area of Charentes, France

Abstract

Electrophoretic karyotyping, mitochondrial DNA restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis, and PCR amplification of interspersed repeats were used to study the variability, phylogenetic affinities, and biogeographic distribution of wild Saccharomyces cerevisiae enological yeasts. The survey concentrated on 42 individual wine cellars in the Charentes area (Cognac region, France). A limited number (35) of predominant S. cerevisiae strains responsible for the fermentation process have been identified by the above molecular methods of differentiation. One strain (ACI) was found to be distributed over the entire area surveyed. There seemed to be little correlation between geographic location and genetic affinity.

Biodiversity ofSaccharomycesyeast strains from grape berries of wine-producing areas using starter commercial yeasts

“…The large majority of the 104 chromosomal patterns of S. cerevisiae strains identified were unique, demonstrating an enormous biodiversity of indigenous S. cerevisiae strains in this region of France. Considering the ratio between the number of Saccharomyces isolates and the number of patterns as an approximate biodiversity estimation, our overall results (about six strains per pattern) showed similar values to those found in Portugal by Schuller et al (2005) and in previously published studies on the genetic diversity of indigenous S. cerevisiae strains in other viticultural regions of France (Vézinhet et al, 1992;Versavaud et al, 1995). In our study, this general estimation includes different situations, in contrast to the Portuguese results, where no apparent correlation between the number of strains involved in a fermentation and sampling site, year or vineyard was found .…”

“…With respect to the impact of the utilization of commercial yeast as a fermentation starter in the wineries, our study appears to show that the biodiversity of autochthonous species of S. cerevisiae remains very close to that reported in other studies, including fermentations in wineries where no commercial wine yeast strains have been used (Frezier & Dubourdieu, 1992;Vézinhet et al, 1992;Versavaud et al, 1995;Sabate et al, 1998;Torija et al, 2001). Furthermore, the fact that we found very different levels of biodiversity in the three vineyards studied (A, B and C) around the wineries that had utilized commercial yeast in large quantities for a long time verifies that other factors were more important than commercial yeast utilization for the biodiversity of the vineyard.…”

“…Extensive ecological surveys using molecular methods of identification have been carried out with the aim of selecting new yeasts better adapted to local fermentation conditions (Pretorius et al, 1999;Khan et al, 2000;van der Westhuizen et al, 2000a). These and other publications (Versavaud et al, 1995;Lopes et al, 2002) report a great diversity of genetic patterns among the enological fermentative microbial communities. Saccharomyces cerevisiae strains seem to be widely distributed in a given viticultural region, and they can be found in consecutive years (Vézinhet et al, 1992;Torija et al, 2001); there are also strains predominant in fermenting microbial communities (Frezier & Dubourdieu, 1992;Sabate et al, 1998), suggesting the occurrence of specific native strains that can be associated with a terroir.…”

Genetically different wine yeasts isolated from Austrian vine-growing regions influence wine aroma differently and contain putative hybrids betweenSaccharomyces cerevisiaeandSaccharomyces kudriavzevii

“…Genetic studies have shown significant differences among commercial and laboratory S. cerevisiae strains (Benitez et al, 1996;Mortimer, 2000;Dunn et al, 2005). Whereas most strains used in the laboratory have a defined set of chromosome lengths and are haploid or diploid, frequently investigated yeasts associated with alcoholic fermentation show chromosomal alterations and variations in ploidy (Versavaud et al, 1995;Miklos et al, 1997;Rachidi et al, 1999). Wine yeasts may exhibit genetic instability with gross chromosomal rearrangements, chromosome length polymorphisms and may be polyploid or aneuploid (Dunham et al, 2002;Naumova et al, 2005;Bradbury et al, 2006).…”

Application of Multi Locus Sequence Typing to the analysis of the biodiversity of indigenous Saccharomyces cerevisiae wine yeasts from Lebanon

“…Many methods were developed and applied for such purposes. Methods like karyotyping based on chromosome length polymorphism, or mitochondrial DNA polymorphism are the most widely used (Querol et al 1992;Versavaud et al 1995;Nadal et al 1996;Comi et al 2000;Lopez et al 2001), but they can be cumbersome and time-consuming. Several polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based techniques were proposed, like random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) associated or not with restriction analysis (Quesada and Cenis 1995;Perez et al 2001) or with sequencing (McGrath et al 1998), amplification of introns of the mitochondrial gene COX1 or using intron splice site primers (de Barros Lopes et al 1996;Lopez et al 2003), amplification of genomic regions using primers associated with delta elements of retrotransposons (Ness et al 1993;Legras and Karst 2003), or fingerprinting of microsatellite markers (Gallego et al 1998;Hennequin et al 2001;Legras et al 2005).…”