Co-Regulatory Genes of CEBiP: A Stress Responsive Gene for Rice Blast Infection

Abstract

CEBiP is the major binding receptor for chitin elicitors and provides resistance against Magnaporthe oryzae, the causal agent of rice blast disease. Chitin elicitors lead to various defense responses in plants. CEBiP has been shown to interact with chitin elicitors and trigger the downstream defense responses. Here we identified genes that are co regulated with CEBiP and may play a role in defense mechanism for blast infection. Microaray data were downloaded from NCBI GEO database and analyzed using R and bioconductor packages. K mean clustering was performed on the datasets and pearson correlation coefficients were calculated for genes falling in same cluster as CEBiP using SPSS. Genes identified for leaf tissues showed high correlation. For the dataset of blast infected root tissue, most of the identified genes in cluster were also correlated. The results suggest that defense mechanism to counteract chitin elicitor during blast infection is slightly different in leaf and roots, as the identified genes for both the tissues are different. Further, most of the identified genes have not been previously reported to be involved in rice defense and hence are novel targets for future studies.