Insights into organ-specific pathogen defense responses in plants: RNA-seq analysis of potato tuber-Phytophthora infestans interactions

Liangliang Gao, Zheng Jin Tu, Benjamin P. Millett, James M. Bradeen

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99 Scopus citations

Abstract

Background: The late blight pathogen Phytophthora infestans can attack both potato foliage and tubers. Although interaction transcriptome dynamics between potato foliage and various pathogens have been reported, no transcriptome study has focused specifically upon how potato tubers respond to pathogen infection. When inoculated with P. infestans, tubers of nontransformed 'Russet Burbank' (WT) potato develop late blight disease while those of transgenic 'Russet Burbank' line SP2211 (+RB), which expresses the potato late blight resistance gene RB (Rpi-blb1), do not. We compared transcriptome responses to P. infestans inoculation in tubers of these two lines.Results: We demonstrated the practicality of RNA-seq to study tetraploid potato and present the first RNA-seq study of potato tuber diseases. A total of 483 million paired end Illumina RNA-seq reads were generated, representing the transcription of around 30,000 potato genes. Differentially expressed genes, gene groups and ontology bins that exhibited differences between the WT and +RB lines were identified. P. infestans transcripts, including those of known effectors, were also identified.Conclusion: Faster and stronger activation of defense related genes, gene groups and ontology bins correlate with successful tuber resistance against P. infestans. Our results suggest that the hypersensitive response is likely a general form of resistance against the hemibiotrophic P. infestans-even in potato tubers, organs that develop below ground.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number340
JournalBMC Genomics
Volume14
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - May 23 2013

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
The work was funded by USDA NIFA, EPA, MN area II Potato Research and Promotion Council and a Thesis Research Grant to LLG from the Graduate School, University of Minnesota. The authors thank Dr. Mark Lohse of Max Planck Institute (Germany) for generating a draft PGSC mapping file for MapMan analysis in potato. The authors thank Dr. Fumiaki Katagiri for thoughtful comments on statistical analysis and draft versions of our manuscript. Computing resources from the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute at the University of Minnesota are greatly appreciated.

Keywords

  • ET (Ethylene)
  • FPKM (fragments per kilobase of exon per million mapped reads)
  • JA (jasmonic acid)
  • Next-generation sequencing (NGS)
  • Phytophthora infestans
  • QRT-PCR
  • RNA-seq
  • SA (salicylic acid)
  • Solanum tuberosum

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