Study the mechanisms of interaction between genotype and environment and their application in the zoning of the white wines, using a metabolomic approach.

Supervisor : Urska Vrhovsek

Environmental factors (terrain morphology, agro-pedological characteristics, climate and viticultural/enological practices), usually described with the French term “terroir”, influence grape and wine composition and quality. Several wine compounds, including aromas, are influenced by these factors in different ways. Therefore, studying wine aromatic profiles can contribute towards obtaining a geographical designation such as of origin. It serves as a benchmark and guarantees product consistency, defining a product that is characteristic of a certain region. 
The scope of this work is to study in which way the metabolomics space of aroma compounds in wines can be influenced by these factors applying untargeted metabolomics approach. This approach aims to gather information on as many metabolites as possible in biological systems by taking into account all information present in the data sets. 
For this purpose, a comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography (GC×GC) will be employed to this work. Being a powerful analytical technique it is an excellent choice for unravelling the composition of complex samples. The technique offers the best separation ability, with higher peak capacity, selectivity, structural chromatographic peak organisation and sensitivity enhancement making it very useful for analysis of volatile composition in wines. Subsequent statistics and bioinformatics tools can be used to provide a detailed view on the differences and similarities between (groups of) samples or to link metabolomics data to other systems biology information, genetic markers and/or specific quality parameters.

Biography and contacts

Silvia Carlin studied Food Science and Technology at the University of Udine, where she graduated in 1998. Since 1998 she worked at the Research and Innovation Centre of the Fondazione Edmund Mach (ex Istituto Agrario di San Michele all’Adige, Trento, Italy) involved in several research investigations on different food matrices (wine, cheese, honey, and different fruits). From 2001 to 2003 she got a fellowship to work on definition of analytical methods to study the volatile compounds in grape and wine products using SPME and SPE with GC-MS and GC-FID techniques. Since 2004 she is part of the permanent staff in the Food Quality and Nutrition Area. She has experience in aroma analysis and hyphenated techniques.
silvia.carlin@spes.uniud.it [Phone 0461615567]