Plant, Animal & Microbe Genomes X Conference January 12-16, 2002 Town & Country Convention Center San Diego, CA Poster: General THE ANALYSIS OF Vitis CHLOROPLAST GENOME POLYMORPHISMS AROUND THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA PROVIDE CLUES TO UNDERSTAND GRAPEVINE DOMESTICATION Rosa Arroyo Garcia1 , Leonor Ruiz-Garcia1 , Sabit Agaoglu2 , Roberto Botta3 , Felix Cabello4 , Jose Cenis5 , Laura Constantini6 , Svetlana Gorislavets7 , Valentina Risovannaya7 , Ali Ergul2 , Stella Grando6 , Patrick McGovern8 , IvanPejic9 , Nikolas Primikirios14 , Kristina Sefc10 , Petraq Sotiri11 , Herta Steinkellner10 , Leonid Troshin12 , Luan Zyka13 , François Lefort14 , Jose Martinez-Zapater1 1 Centro Nacional de Biotecnologia, Campus de la UAM, 28049 Madrid, Spain Department of Horticulture , Faculty of Agriculture, Ankara University, 06110 Dipkapy-Ankara, Turkey 3 Universita degli Studi di Torino, Via Leonardo da Vinci 44, 10095 Grugliasco (TO), Italy 4 Finca El Encin, IMIA, Alcala de Henares, 28800 Madrid, Spain 5 CIDA, 30150, La Alberca, Murcia, Spain 6 Istituto Agrario S. Michele all Adige, Via Mach,1, 38010 Trento, Italia. 7 Institut of Vine and Wine Magarach, 31 Kirov St. 98600 Yalta, Crimea, Ukraine. 8 Museum of Archeology and Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, PA 19104, USA. 9 Department of Plant Breeding, Genetics and Biometrics, University of Zagreb, HR-10000 Zagreb, Croatia. 10 Zentrum fur Angewandte Genetik, Universitat fur Bodenkultur Wien, A-1190 Vienna, Austria. 11 Institute of Biology, Academy of Science, Tirana, Albania. 12 Viticulture Department, Kuban State Agrarian University, 350044 Krasnodar, Russia. 13 Department of Horticulture, Agricultural University of Tirana, Tirana, Albania. 14 Department of Biology, University of Crete, 71409 Heraklion, Crete, Greece. 2 The use of consensus chloroplast microsatellites primers for dicotyledonous chloroplast genomes revealed the existence of intra- and inter-specific length variation within the genus Vitis. Three chloroplast microsatellite loci were found polymorphic in samples of Vitis vinifera, out of a total of ten consensus primer pairs tested. These polymorphisms were always due to a variable number of mononucleotide residues within A/T stretches in the amplified regions. Chloroplast microsatellite polymorphisms were used to characterize the chloroplast haplotypes present in wine and table grapevine (Vitis vinifera) in more than 500 varieties grown around the Mediterranean sea as well as in several wild isolates. This analysis shows the existence of a clinal distribution from East to West for the frequencies of most haplotypes. The number and distribution of haplotypes in different regions suggest that Vitis vinifera has been independently domesticated in several locations. Finally, comparison of haplotype frequencies between wine and table grape varieties shows different distributions depending on the grapevine use.