A Metabolic Network for Vitis vinifera

Cultivation of grape (Vitis vinifera) is as ancient as human civilization itself and the influence of terrain, climate change and nurture on the quality of the fruit and the resulting wine is now being investigated with new tools and data sets.  Publication of the draft genome of Vitis vinifera in 2007 marked a milestone in understanding the metabolic processes in grape and has facilitated the identification of ‘all’ protein coding genes that could catalyze these processes. Recently several studies were published on unraveling the molecular make up of grape cultivars and the biological and metabolic processes which may govern the quality of the berry or the resulting wine. Therefore, to capture the known knowledge and investigate and compute new knowledge emerging from the genome sequencing, we have created a metabolic network for grape using Pathway Tools software version 15. The projected preliminary network includes 497 pathways, 2908 enzymatic reactions, 31 transport reactions and 2035 compounds. With a focus on metabolic processes involved during fruit development and ripening we are improving the annotation of pathways related to hormone biosynthesis and secondary metabolism. We also analyzed the developed metabolic network by looking at a publically available gene expression dataset on berry development. The GrapeCyc metabolic pathway database and the analysis tools would be available freely to the community and hopefully contribute towards enriching the genome annotation as well as enabling grape researchers to investigate and graphically analyze the metabolome, transcriptome or the proteome of grape.