Abstract
Fusarium head blight (FHB), primarily caused by Fusarium graminearum, is one of the most devastating fungal wheat diseases. During the past decades, many efforts have been deployed to dissect FHB resistance, investigating both the wheat responses to infection and, more recently, the fungal determinants of pathogenicity. Although no total resistance has been identified so far, they demonstrated that some plant functions and the expression of specific genes are needed to promote FHB. Associated with the increasing list of F. graminearum effectors able to divert plant molecular processes, this fact strongly argues for a functional link between susceptibility-related factors and the fate of this disease in wheat. In this review, we gather more recent data concerning the involvement of plant and fungal genes and the functions and mechanisms in the development of FHB susceptibility, and we discuss the possibility to use them to diversify the current sources of FHB resistance.
Highlights
Fusarium head blight (FHB) is a cereal fungal disease primarily induced by Fusarium graminearum (Goswami and Kistler, 2004; Xu and Nicholson, 2009)
An extensive literature dealing with largescale analyses has already shown that, compared to resistant cultivars, the most susceptible ones are characterized by a specific deregulation of genes involved in a wide range of molecular processes, suggesting the intricate participation of a wealth of potential susceptibility factors (Ding et al, 2011; Gottwald et al, 2012; Erayman et al, 2015; Pan et al, 2018; Wang et al, 2018; Brauer et al, 2019)
Such examples suggest that a substantial subset of susceptibility genes (S genes)/factors could be present in the wheat genome and highly conserved among the wheat cultivars
Summary
Fusarium head blight (FHB), primarily caused by Fusarium graminearum, is one of the most devastating fungal wheat diseases. No total resistance has been identified so far, they demonstrated that some plant functions and the expression of specific genes are needed to promote FHB. Associated with the increasing list of F. graminearum effectors able to divert plant molecular processes, this fact strongly argues for a functional link between susceptibility-related factors and the fate of this disease in wheat. We gather more recent data concerning the involvement of plant and fungal genes and the functions and mechanisms in the development of FHB susceptibility, and we discuss the possibility to use them to diversify the current sources of FHB resistance
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