Jake’s now taking a more scientific view of vineyards

A younger Jake Dunlevy would have been staggered to learn that he’d eventually make a career in viticultural research. As a teenager, he grew to hate the very concept of anything to do with grapevines after too many holiday hours spent weeding the family vineyard in Willunga, near McLaren Vale.

However, a degree in biotechnology led to Honours work then a PhD on wine flavour at the CSIRO, and now he’s making a name for himself doing research on rootstock and vine genetics.

Earlier this month in Canberra, the now 32-year-old Dr Dunlevy was announced as the recipient of the Viticulture and Oenology section of the 2016 Science and Innovation Awards, which are run by the Australian Government Department of Agriculture and Water Resources and sponsored by Wine Australia.

The award will allow him to add a new component to his current four-year, Wine Australia-funded project looking at a novel genetic approach to keeping salt out of vines – and therefore wine.

With CSIRO colleagues, Jake is using new DNA sequencing and analytical technologies to undertake an association mapping study, which is a detailed genetic survey of different grapevine species and varieties, to identify genes responsible for chloride exclusion.

‘There’s two aspects to the salt problem – the sodium and the chloride – and their uptake and movement within the vine is controlled by different mechanisms and therefore different genes’, he said. ‘The sodium story has been pretty well characterised in other plants over the last decade so we’ve had some key target genes that we wanted to look at as we think they are the same genes responsible in grapevines.

‘We’ve got good data to show that and we’ve got markers now that we think we’ll be able to use for breeding and to select between the sodium excluders and sodium accumulators. So that’s all quite clear cut and going as we predicted.

‘But the chloride uptake is a bit of an enigma; no-one’s been really able to narrow down the genes in any plant. We think it’s probably controlled by more than one gene, which makes it harder because when you have a population the trait doesn’t segregate into excluders and accumulators.

‘There’s a gradient of differences between them, which makes it harder to tease apart. But we are making progress and we’ve got a few candidate genes that we want to look at.’

The key to the project is access to the plant accelerator on the Waite Campus in Adelaide. This is essentially a high-tech greenhouse in which plants sit on conveyer belts, allowing them to be moved daily so their growth and other parameters such as water usage and salt concentration can be measured precisely.

‘You get a really accurate tool for screening for salt tolerance, whereas out in the vineyard there’s a lot of variability’, Jake said. ‘We’re the first ones to use the accelerator with grapevines’.

The work has been so successful that he had already decided to up the ante in the third year of the project and test a broad range of different varieties selected from the CSIRO’s extensive germplasm collection in Mildura.

Armed with the additional funding from his recent award he will now be able to extend things even further, looking at the genetics of these varieties as well as measuring their salt tolerance. And that will have benefits for many other researchers as well.

‘The genetic information lasts forever; it’s not going to change, so even though we screened these plants for sodium and chloride exclusion there’s other groups here working on phylloxera resistance or nematode resistance or potassium uptake – all sorts of things’, Jake said.

‘Just having that genetic resource, they’ll be able to utilise it for the traits they are looking at as well. It doesn’t just help me; it helps other groups in the future.’