Abstract
BackgroundFusarium crown rot (FCR) is a chronic disease in cereal production worldwide. The impact of this disease is highly environmentally dependant and significant yield losses occur mainly in drought-affected crops.ResultsIn the study reported here, we evaluated possible relationships between genes conferring FCR resistance and drought tolerance using two approaches. The first approach studied FCR induced differentially expressed genes (DEGs) targeting two barley and one wheat loci against a panel of genes curated from the literature based on known functions in drought tolerance. Of the 149 curated genes, 61.0% were responsive to FCR infection across the three loci. The second approach was a comparison of the global DEGs induced by FCR infection with the global transcriptomic responses under drought in wheat. This analysis found that approximately 48.0% of the DEGs detected one week following drought treatment and 74.4% of the DEGs detected three weeks following drought treatment were also differentially expressed between the susceptible and resistant isolines under FCR infection at one or more timepoints. As for the results from the first approach, the vast majority of common DEGs were downregulated under drought and expressed more highly in the resistant isoline than the sensitive isoline under FCR infection.ConclusionsResults from this study suggest that the resistant isoline in wheat was experiencing less drought stress, which could contribute to the stronger defence response than the sensitive isoline. However, most of the genes induced by drought stress in barley were more highly expressed in the susceptible isolines than the resistant isolines under infection, indicating that genes conferring drought tolerance and FCR resistance may interact differently between these two crop species. Nevertheless, the strong relationship between FCR resistance and drought responsiveness provides further evidence indicating the possibility to enhance FCR resistance by manipulating genes conferring drought tolerance.
Highlights
Fusarium crown rot (FCR) is a chronic disease in cereal production worldwide
Molecular responses to crown rot were enriched for drought related processes in wheat but not in barley Comparison of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between resistant (‘R’) and susceptible (‘S’) isolines following control-inoculation and F. pseudograminearum-inoculation (Supplementary Table 1) was conducted to determine whether DEGs which were shared among 1HL, 4HL and 3BL had significant enrichment for drought related processes and functions
Based on the available transcriptome sequences from NILs targeting three different loci conferring FCR resistance in wheat and barley, we investigated possible relationships between genes induced by FCR and drought using two different approaches
Summary
Fusarium crown rot (FCR) is a chronic disease in cereal production worldwide. The impact of this disease is highly environmentally dependant and significant yield losses occur mainly in drought-affected crops. Fusarium crown rot (FCR), which can be caused by various Fusarium species with F. pseudograminearum being the dominant pathogen in most regions, is a chronic disease in wheat and barley production in semi-arid regions worldwide [1,2,3]. Seedling death does occur when the disease is severe [3], likely leading to yield loss in crop production. There are no reported studies investigating possible effects of seedling death on grain yield. ‘White heads’ with shrivelled or no kernels are a common feature of FCR infected plants especially in wheat crops which suffered drought stress after flowering [1, 8]
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