Platform of Hot Pepper Defense Genomics: Isolation of Pathogen Responsive Genes in Hot Pepper (Capsicum annuum L.) Non-Host Resistance Against Soybean Pustule Pathogen (Xanthomonas axonopodis pv. glycines)

Abstract

Host resistance is usually parasite-specific and is restricted to a particular pathogen races, and commonly is expressed against specific pathogen genotypes. In contrast, resistance shown by an entire plant species to a species of pathogen is known as non-host resistance. Therefore, non-host resistance is the more common and broad form of disease resistance exhibited by plants. As a first step to understand the mechanism of non-host plant defense, expressed sequence tags (EST) were generated from a hot pepper leaf cDNA library constructed from combined leaves collected at different time points after inoculation with non-host soybean pustule pathogen (Xanthomonas axonopodis pv. Glycines; Xag). To increase gene diversity, ESTs were also generated from cDNA libraries constructed from anthers and flower buds. Among a total of 10,061 ESTs, 8,525 were of sufficient quality to analyze further. Clustering analysis revealed that 55 ％ of all ESTs (4685) occurred only once. BLASTX analysis revealed that 74％ of the ESTs had significant sequence similarity to known proteins present in the NCBI nr database. In addition, 1,265 ESTs were tentatively identified as being full-length cDNAs. Functional classification of the ESTs derived from pathogen-infected pepper leaves revealed that about 25％ were disease- or defense-related genes. Furthermore, 323 (7％) ESTs were tentatively identified as being unique to hot pepper. This study represents the first analysis of sequence data from the hot pepper plant species. Although we focused on genes related to the plant defense response, our data will be useful for future comparative studies.