Abstract
BackgroundPhytophthora infestans is a plant pathogen that causes an important plant disease known as late blight in potato plants (Solanum tuberosum) and several other solanaceous hosts. This disease is the main factor affecting potato crop production worldwide. In spite of the importance of the disease, the molecular mechanisms underlying the compatibility between the pathogen and its hosts are still unknown.ResultsTo explain the metabolic response of late blight, specifically photosynthesis inhibition in infected plants, we reconstructed a genome-scale metabolic network of the S. tuberosum leaf, PstM1. This metabolic network simulates the effect of this disease in the leaf metabolism. PstM1 accounts for 2751 genes, 1113 metabolic functions, 1773 gene-protein-reaction associations and 1938 metabolites involved in 2072 reactions. The optimization of the model for biomass synthesis maximization in three infection time points suggested a suppression of the photosynthetic capacity related to the decrease of metabolic flux in light reactions and carbon fixation reactions. In addition, a variation pattern in the flux of carboxylation to oxygenation reactions catalyzed by RuBisCO was also identified, likely to be associated to a defense response in the compatible interaction between P. infestans and S. tuberosum.ConclusionsIn this work, we introduced simultaneously the first metabolic network of S. tuberosum and the first genome-scale metabolic model of the compatible interaction of a plant with P. infestans.
Highlights
Phytophthora infestans is a plant pathogen that causes an important plant disease known as late blight in potato plants (Solanum tuberosum) and several other solanaceous hosts
The model will be useful for understanding other molecular mechanisms involved during the pathosystem activity and for proposing novel directed hypotheses, guiding research to conduct metabolic engineering in the plant, and identifying emerging properties of the compatible interaction, which otherwise could not be observed through the study of individual molecules and processes
Based on previous reports, we manually reviewed complete or partial pathways that induced a defense response in the plant, such as those related to accumulation of salicylic acid and jasmonic acid [41], as well as other pathways related to PAMP signaling cascades (Additional file 1)
Summary
Phytophthora infestans is a plant pathogen that causes an important plant disease known as late blight in potato plants (Solanum tuberosum) and several other solanaceous hosts. This disease is the main factor affecting potato crop production worldwide. Plants use various strategies to resist pathogen attack and to avoid the development of diseases, such as, massive transcriptional reprogramming, production of reactive oxygen species (ROS), reinforcements of the cell wall and synthesis of antimicrobial secondary metabolites and pathogenesis-related proteins involved in resistance [1,2,3]. The economic value of this loss and the cost of crop protection are estimated at 6.7 billion dollars a year [13]
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