Wine grapes carry harmful genetic load, study confirms.
Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences have used machine learning to analyze genetic sequence data from wild and domestic European grapes. They found that wine grapes have a high deleterious genetic burden due to hybridization events and intentional breeding improvements. The identification of beneficial and deleterious variants could be important factors for a more genomic-based strategy of breeding grapevines. Table grapes were also looked at in the study and were found to have 100 times lower hybridization events, suggesting that while wine grapes have gone through intensive crop improvement, the table grape has been perfect all along.