A preliminary study on the root-knot nematode resistance of a cherry plum cultivar Mirabolano 29C

Abstract

Grafting is the most important means of breeding peach, plum, apricot, and other fruit trees, and the selection of the rootstock is crucial to the quality of the grafting and the yield of the products. The traditional commonly used peach rootstock is susceptible to root-knot nematode infections, resulting in a decreased yield, while a variety of cherry plum rootstocks, Mirabolano 29C, is resistant to root-knot nematode. In this study, root-knot nematode infection experiments on seedlings of traditional peach rootstocks and Mirabolano 29C confirmed that Mirabolano 29C was indeed more resistant to root-knot nematodes. At the same time, we compared the roots of the root-knot nematode uninfected and infected Mirabolano 29C by transcriptome sequencing and found 3 176 differentially expressed genes. A further functional enrichment analysis of these genes found that the secondary metabolites, phenylpropane and flavonoids, may be responsible for the high resistance of Mirabolano 29C to root-knot nematodes. These results can provide a reference value for the disease resistance breeding of rootstocks.