Participation in 10th International Symposium on Grapevine Physiology and Biotechnology and Collaborative Links with researchers in Italy and France

Abstract

This travel grant assisted in funding Dr Leigh Schmidtke to travel to attend two international conferences and visit collaborators in Paris and Italy. The X International Symposium on Grapevine Physiology and Biotechnology was held at Palazzo della Gran Guardia Verona from June 13th to 18th 2016. This symposium focussed on: Plant and Fruit Development; Yield, Berry Ripening, Grape and Wine Quality; Environmental Interactions and Climate Change; Soil, Water Relations and Mineral Nutrition; Grapevine-Pathogen Interactions and Disease Resistance; Advances in phenotypes, -omic Technologies and Postharvest Physiology. Recent Wine Australia funded research outputs were presented in the form of an oral presentation titled ‘Grapes to Wine: The Nexus Between berry Ripening, Composition and Wine Style’, and a poster titled ‘Study of Berry heterogeneity, Spatial Distribution and Ripening Within a Bunch: Potential Role of the Seed Content’. The XVI Chemometrics in Analytical Chemistry (CAC) conference was held in Barcelona from June 6th to 10th. This international conference is the leading scientific symposium for chemometrics and focused on: Theory and Method Development; Large Data; Multiblock data Analysis; Design of Experiments; Statistical process Control; Hyperspectral image Analysis; Food and Sensory Analysis and Data Fusion. Research outputs were presented in poster format titled ‘Grapes to Wine: Finding Contributors to Wine Style with Multiblock Analysis’. Both conferences were well attended with approximately 250 delegates at each venue that allowed excellent opportunities for network with existing and potential collaborators. The travel grant also enabled an opportunity to liaise with Professor Douglas Rutledge from AgroParisTech on applications of several novel chemometric data methods for grape and wine composition and discussions with Fulvio Mattivi and Urska Vrhovsek from Fondazione Edmund Mach, San Michele, Italy on continuing collaborations.

Summary

The X International Symposium on Grapevine Physiology and Biotechnology was held at Palazzo della Gran Guardia Verona from June 13th to 18th 2016 and was attended by approximately 250 delegates. The symposium focused on recent advances in grapevine research, biotechnology and physiology with 76 presentations and over 220 posters. This forum provided an excellent opportunity to be exposed to the latest technologies and research findings from the leading viticultural scientists in the world. Research outputs from the Wine Australia funded project NWG1301 Optimising grape quality and value to improve vineyard profitability and sustainability were presented by Dr Leigh Schmidtke as an oral presentation and a poster. The Chemometrics in Analytical Chemistry conference was held at the World Trade Centre in Barcelona from June 6th to 10th. This forum is the leading symposium for presentation and exchange of recent developments in chemometric and large data analysis. Whilst the conference is specifically orientated to chemical data analysis several sessions were devoted to food, sensory and compositional data analysis. This symposium provide several opportunities to establish new contacts for potential collaborations. Two half day workshops were completed by Dr Leigh Schmidtke which provided insight to metabolomics data analysis and multiblock data fusion methods. Research outcomes from the Wine Australia funded project NWG1301 were presented as a poster. Prior to the CAC conference several days in Paris enabled continued liaison and collaborations with Professor Douglas Rutledge at AgroParisTech. This period of time was most valuable for arranging transfer of data pertaining to multiple blocks of analysed samples from a number of wine related projects. Furthermore, consideration of cross validation procedures for Soft Independent Modelling of Class Analogy (SIMCA) data sets were considered and some preliminary data analysis routines written that with some additional coding will enable these routines to be regularly employed for the purposes of supervised classification.