The origin of the particular aroma of noble rot wines: various fungi contribute to the development of the aroma profile of botrytised grape berries

During noble rot (NR), B. cinerea, together with other filamentous fungi and yeasts, play a role in developing the unique aromatic profile of botrytised wines. To gain more insight into latter, we generated metatranscriptomic data representing four NR stages (I-IV) from Tokaj wine region Hungary over three months. Since previous research has indicated that most prevalent yeast include Alternaria alternata, Botrytis Epicoccum nigrum, Aureobasidium pullulans Rhodotorula graminis, RNAseq reads were aligned to latter species. A weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA) followed by non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS), eigengene ANOVA enrichment analyses performed. Amongst ten module clusters, enriched pathways involved synthesising compounds such as amino acid-, carbohydrate- lipid metabolism co-jointly expressed all identified within turquoise module. Furthermore, it was found enzymes synthesis are up-regulated during later (III-IV) process. This study wines is due contributions yeasts belonging grape microbiome, main occurring stages.