Proteomics-Based Data Integration of Wheat Cultivars Facing Fusarium graminearum Strains Revealed a Core-Responsive Pattern Controlling Fusarium Head Blight.

Francis Fabre,Serge Urbach,Ludovic Bonhomme,Thierry Langin,Sylvie Roche

doi:10.3389/fpls.2021.644810

Abstract

Fusarium head blight (FHB), mainly occurring upon Fusarium graminearum infection in a wide variety of small-grain cereals, is supposed to be controlled by a range of processes diverted by the fungal pathogen, the so-called susceptibility factors. As a mean to provide relevant information about the molecular events involved in FHB susceptibility in bread wheat, we studied an extensive proteome of more than 7,900 identified wheat proteins in three cultivars of contrasting susceptibilities during their interaction with three F. graminearum strains of different aggressiveness. No cultivar-specific proteins discriminated the three wheat genotypes, demonstrating the establishment of a core proteome regardless of unequivocal FHB susceptibility differences. Quantitative protein analysis revealed that most of the FHB-induced molecular adjustments were shared by wheat cultivars and occurred independently of the F. graminearum strain aggressiveness. Although subtle abundance changes evidenced genotype-dependent responses to FHB, cultivar distinction was found to be mainly due to basal abundance differences, especially regarding the chloroplast functions. Integrating these data with previous proteome mapping of the three F. graminearum strains facing the three same wheat cultivars, we demonstrated strong correlations between the wheat protein abundance changes and the adjustments of fungal proteins supposed to interfere with host molecular functions. Together, these results provide a resourceful dataset that expands our understanding of the specific molecular events taking place during the wheat–F. graminearum interaction.

Highlights

Fusarium head blight (FHB), firstly described by Smith (1884), is a microbial disease associated with several fungal species from the Fusarium and Microdochium genera that affect smallgrain cereals throughout the world (Parry et al, 1995; Goswami and Kistler, 2004)
Previous analyses performed on the same host and pathogen couples demonstrated the development of a similar fungal mass for the three F. graminearum strains regardless of the host, while the symptom severity significantly differed between the three host cultivars, ranking Recital, Cadenza, and Renan in decreasing order of susceptibility (Fabre et al, 2019a)
Three distinct protein sets have been categorized according to their detection in the different host by fungal strain combinations: a “core proteome” set gathered all common proteins to the three wheat cultivars identified in both infected and control samples; an “extended core proteome” set, determined by analogy to the extended core genome described by Lapierre and Gogarten (2009), was characterized by proteins common to the three cultivars but not necessarily identified in both the infected and control conditions; and an “accessory proteome” set including all proteins undetected in each sample of at least one wheat cultivar (Figure 1)

Summary

Introduction

Fusarium head blight (FHB), firstly described by Smith (1884), is a microbial disease associated with several fungal species from the Fusarium and Microdochium genera that affect smallgrain cereals throughout the world (Parry et al, 1995; Goswami and Kistler, 2004). (Li et al, 2019; Su et al, 2019; Brauer et al, 2020; Su et al, 2021) or indirectly identified (Ma et al, 2006; Basnet et al, 2012; Garvin et al, 2015; Hales et al, 2020), the deletion of these genes coding for the so-called susceptibility factors may provide a complementary approach to the introgression of gain-of-function resistance genes (Fabre et al, 2020; Moniruzzaman et al, 2020; Gorash et al, 2021) Despite these attempts to elucidate the molecular processes involved both in wheat resistance and susceptibility to FHB, understanding this interaction still requires many efforts, in particular by reconciling information from the two partners of this pathosystem

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion