Abstract
Pathogen infections seriously threaten plant health and global crop production. Epigenetic processes such as DNA methylation, histone post-translational modifications, chromatin assembly and remodeling play important roles in transcriptional regulation of plant defense responses and could provide a new direction to drive breeding strategies for crop disease resistance improvement. Although past decades have seen unprecedented proceedings in understanding the epigenetic mechanism of plant defense response, most of these advances were derived from studies in model plants like Arabidopsis. In this review, we highlighted the recent epigenetic studies on crop-pathogen interactions and discussed the potentials, challenges, and strategies in exploiting epigenetic variations for crop disease resistance improvement.
Highlights
The dense monoculture of domesticated crops usually enhances the production value of cultivated land in intensive agriculture (Bruce, 2012)
pattern-triggered immunity (PTI) and effector-triggered immunity (ETI) differ in the magnitude and duration of downstream defense responses, they are mutually potentiated in the unified plant immunity and both associated with a massive transcriptional reprogramming of defense-related genes (Birkenbihl et al, 2017; Adachi and Tsuda, 2019; Bjornson et al, 2021; Ngou et al, 2021; Pruitt et al, 2021; Yuan et al, 2021)
We highlighted the importance of epigenetic processes in the regulation of crop disease resistance, and discussed the potentials, challenges, and strategies of exploiting epigenetic variation for crop disease resistance improvement
Summary
The dense monoculture of domesticated crops usually enhances the production value of cultivated land in intensive agriculture (Bruce, 2012). Increasing evidence revealed that epigenetic processes such as DNA methylation, histone post-translational modifications, chromatin assembly and remodeling govern this defense-related transcriptional reprogramming and play key roles in the regulation of crop disease resistance against a wide range of phytopathogens, including viruses, bacteria, fungi, oomycetes, netamodes, and herbivorous insects (Ding and Wang, 2015; Espinas et al, 2016; Zhu et al, 2016; Ramirez-Prado et al, 2018a,b; Wang C. et al, 2018; Alonso et al, 2019).
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