Key points
- Dr Christine Böttcher is focused on developing disease-resistant grapevines, helping reduce chemical use and improving sustainability in Australian viticulture.
- Her team’s work targets major threats like powdery mildew, using new breeding techniques to strengthen natural plant defences without compromising wine quality.
- Backed by decades of CSIRO expertise and close collaboration with Wine Australia, Christine’s research is building a foundation for the next generation of resilient grapevines.
Growing up in Germany, a young Christine Böttcher never met a creepy crawly she didn’t like. Tadpoles, insects and lizards were all invited home, where she kept them in an array of jars and boxes. Christine caught mosquitoes and flies to feed her guests and kept extensive notes on their habits and preferences. She was certain zoology was her path.
So, no one is more surprised than Christine herself that she grew up to be a plant physiologist. It took the right science class – and a particularly inspiring professor – to discover that plants were as dynamic, interesting and active as any animal she’d ever met.
“I learned that plants use compounds to fight pests and even each other – I came to understand that they were just trying to survive and could do really interesting things to achieve that,” Christine said.
From creepy crawlies to plant defence
Plants are masters of chemical defence. They can’t run, so they fight back with toxins, signalling compounds, and sometimes by sacrificing infected cells to stop invaders from spreading.
At the heart of these responses are plant hormones – fast-moving chemical signals that help plants coordinate when to grow, when to shut down and when to defend. Christine spent her PhD at Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany studying these defence pathways in a small mustard plant called Arabidopsis.
She studied how plants elicit responses to threats like insect attacks, sometimes within seconds. More than just fighting the local attack, plants trigger systemic responses that can flood their remaining leaves with poisons capable of deterring or even killing attackers. They also communicate with each other, releasing hormonal signals into the air that warn nearby kin about the invader.
“It’s an incredibly fast cascade of signals that involves several steps and different locations in the plant. It’s very rapid and quite amazing,” Christine said.
Christine was fascinated by what she was discovering, but while the work was academically rigorous, it didn’t have the real-world impact she wanted to deliver.
From lab to vineyard
The answer came when she joined CSIRO as a research scientist in Adelaide. The role was to be her first real encounter with grapevines.
“I came to it as a complete novice. I had no idea about the industry, or about the complicated quirks these plants have."
Christine had wanted to get out of the lab, and now she well and truly was out in the field. Grapevines, it turned out, grow well in glasshouses but don’t flower and fruit. Unlike the little Arabidopsis, any work with grapevines often took a whole year, or longer if you consider the need to replicate an experiment at least three times.
Though the pace was slower, Christine loved how closely she was working with and responding to the concerns of the industry. She met growers who were struggling with the effects of climate change on their vineyards. For example, the ripening windows of different grapevine cultivars were coming closer together, causing logistical headaches for wineries, which had traditionally relied on staggered harvests. Christine absorbed it all and set out looking for solutions.
“The grapevine is a complex plant,” she said. “It’s perennial, woody, and carries memory from season to season. That makes it hard to manipulate, but it also makes it fascinating.”
A powdery problem
Centuries ago, grapevines have been selectively bred to produce good wine – not necessarily to withstand disease. That has left many varieties vulnerable, particularly to fungal pathogens. One of the most persistent and destructive is powdery mildew, a fungus that cloaks leaves, shoots and fruit in a chalky white film. It weakens the plant, interferes with ripening, and can render whole harvests unusable.
Powdery mildew is so common in Australian vineyards that many growers apply fungicides every seven to 10 days during the growing season – a costly, labour-intensive practice that’s become more about prevention than cure. Even one missed spray can mean an outbreak.
The spores are remarkably resilient. If an infected leaf drops to the ground, the spores can lie dormant through the off-season, waiting in the leaf litter until conditions turn warm and humid again. And controlling it isn’t just a matter of diligence. A careful grower can do everything right – but if their neighbour misses a spray, spores can drift across property lines on the breeze, reigniting infection.
“It’s relentless,” Christine said. “And current fungicide use is costly and not sustainable."
Her team is working to shift that equation – by helping the plant itself fight back.
Building a resilient industry
Christine co-leads two major research projects with fellow CSIRO scientist Paul Boss. In partnership with Wine Australia, their goal is to build disease resistance into the grapevine itself. That means identifying the right traits, understanding the underlying genes and using next generation breeding tools to introduce changes – precisely, and without compromising the qualities winemakers value.
And what are those benefits? Christine hopes they will include a suite of improved grapevines – ones that require fewer chemicals, are cheaper to grow, are more productive, produce quality fruit and remain resilient in the face of disease. She also hopes to tackle other traits over time which protect grapevines from changing environments.
For Christine, this next phase is all about translation – moving science from the lab to the vineyard.
“Obviously I’d like to really see us produce something that we can offer as a product to industry,” she said. “That’s going to be the main goal in the next two years.”
After 17 years with the same species, she’s still learning.
“It’s an interesting, challenging plant to work with,” she said. “And the end product is a good one – and an important one for the economy.”
But for Christine, the real thrill lies in the biology: in decoding how a grapevine reacts to its world, how it chooses to fight and what scientists can do to give it a better chance.