Online tools and databases are key to exploit the potential offered by genomic advances to both research and industry. In plants, the final goal of these resources is to contribute towards crop improvement, which, whether achieved through selective breeding or biotechnological strategies, is largely dependent on the cumulative knowledge of a plant species’ genome (and pangenome) and its containing genes. Acquiring this knowledge is especially challenging in grapevine (Vitis vinifera L.), one of the oldest fruit crops grown worldwide. Well-established research communities studying model organisms have created and maintained, through public and private funds, a diverse range of online tools and databases serving as repositories of genomes and gene function data. The lack of such resources for the non-model, but economically important Vitis vinifera species drives the need for a standardized collection of assets within the grapevine community.

Despite the huge amount of work done by the community since the first release of the grapevine genome sequence in 2007, and the recent contributions from INTEGRAPE (see below) for the standardization of the data, the scenario right now is that the community still feels overwhelmed by dispersed resources available. There is much room for improvement in the community, as these resources need to be made interoperable and centralized in one single platform, offering customized solutions to the whole community built by research teams, breeders and the wine industry considering the problems now faced by climate transition.

In the GRAPEDIA portal, we will centralize, interconnect and showcase these resources, integrating them with those genomic efforts generated by the worldwide community, following a federative database structure. The target group is the entire scientific community working on grapevine or using grapevine as their model plant for an “orphan” plant species, as well as the private sector working on R&D in vitiviniculture.