Abstract

Giant ragweed (Ambrosia trifida) is a highly competitive annual weed prevalent mainly in the United States across the eastern Corn Belt. Glyphosate has been a key herbicide to help tackle the spread of giant ragweed in the past few decades. Recently, there have been reports of widespread resistance to glyphosate in giant ragweed, with the mechanism of resistance yet to be determined. We designed a single-replicate RNA sequencing experiment to study the genes differentially expressed between glyphosate-resistant and glyphosate-sensitive biotypes of giant ragweed. We used a de novo assembly of the giant ragweed transcriptome to determine key marker genes that could help explain the mechanism of resistance.

Highlights

  • Giant ragweed (Ambrosia trifida) is a problematic annual weed in the United States and Canada, in fields where corn and soybean are grown[1,2]

  • There is a clear difference in gene expression patterns between the resistant and sensitive plants even before plants were treated with herbicide (Table 2)

  • This leads us to speculate that, do resistant giant ragweed plants react to glyphosate treatment in a manner resembling pathogen defense reactions, but they are already primed by alterations in stress response processes to hyper-react

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Summary

Introduction

Giant ragweed (Ambrosia trifida) is a problematic annual weed in the United States and Canada, in fields where corn and soybean are grown[1,2]. Due to the extensive use of weed control measures such as the growth of genetically-modified glyphosate-resistant crops, giant ragweed populations have been kept in check[3]. Due to the overuse of glyphosate and strong selective pressure, resistant weeds have been reported across the world (http://www.weedscience.org)[4,5]. The mechanism of resistance to glyphosate in other common weeds such as Malaysian goosegrass, Italian ryegrass, and rigid ryegrass have been identified[6,7,8]. The glyphosate resistance mechanism in giant ragweed is still unknown. We compare gene expression differences between the glyphosate resistant and sensitive giant ragweed plants using a time course experiment and identify genes that could be involved in glyphosate resistance

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