Abstract
Strawberry is economically important and widely grown, but susceptible to a large variety of phytopathogenic organisms. Among them, Xanthomonas fragariae is a quarantine bacterial pathogen threatening strawberry productions by causing angular leaf spots. Using whole transcriptome sequencing, the gene expression of both plant and bacteria in planta was analyzed at two time points, 12 and 29 days post inoculation, in order to compare the pathogen and host response between the stages of early visible and of well-developed symptoms. Among 28,588 known genes in strawberry and 4046 known genes in X. fragariae expressed at both time points, a total of 361 plant and 144 bacterial genes were significantly differentially expressed, respectively. The identified higher expressed genes in the plants were pathogen-associated molecular pattern receptors and pathogenesis-related thaumatin encoding genes, whereas the more expressed early genes were related to chloroplast metabolism as well as photosynthesis related coding genes. Most X. fragariae genes involved in host interaction, recognition, and pathogenesis were lower expressed at late-phase infection. This study gives a first insight into the interaction of X. fragariae with its host. The strawberry plant changed gene expression in order to consistently adapt its metabolism with the progression of infection.
Highlights
Plants cannot move to escape environmental challenges such as various biotic and abiotic factors throughout their life cycle
A study focusing on the gene expression of strawberry fruit ripening of F. × ananassa and assembling transcriptome from RNA-seq data resulted in a high sequence identity of 91.3% with the woodland strawberry Fragaria vesca [8]
To date, most of the strawberry genetic research was focused on F. vesca because of its relatively simple diploid genome compared with F. × ananassa [10]
Summary
Plants cannot move to escape environmental challenges such as various biotic and abiotic factors throughout their life cycle They have developed sophisticated perception systems and polyvalent biochemical defense response mechanisms to cope with these threats [1]. × ananassa and assembling transcriptome from RNA-seq data resulted in a high sequence identity of 91.3% with the woodland strawberry Fragaria vesca [8]. To date, most of the strawberry genetic research was focused on F. vesca because of its relatively simple diploid genome compared with F. F. vesca has a small genome size (approximately 240 Mb; 2n = 2x = 14) [11] and its full genome sequence was publicly released [12], making it relevant as a reference for further genomic analyses
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