Transcriptional Responses of Sclerotinia sclerotiorum to the Infection by SsHADV-1.

Zheng Qu,Zhenzhen Zhao,Yang Lin,Daohong Jiang,Yanping Fu,Tao Chen,Jiasen Cheng,Bo Li,Jiatao Xie,Xuekun Zhang

doi:10.3390/jof7070493

Abstract

The infection by a single-stranded DNA virus, Sclerotinia sclerotiorum hypovirulence-associated DNA virus 1 (SsHADV-1), causes hypovirulence, a reduced growth rate, and other colony morphological changes in its host Sclerotinia sclerotiorum strain DT-8. However, the mechanisms of the decline are still unclear. Using digital RNA sequencing, a transcriptome analysis was conducted to elucidate the phenotype-related genes with expression changes in response to SsHADV-1 infection. A total of 3110 S. sclerotiorum differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were detected during SsHADV-1 infection, 1741 of which were up-regulated, and 1369 were down-regulated. The identified DEGs were involved in several important pathways. DNA replication, DNA damage response, carbohydrate and lipid metabolism, ribosomal assembly, and translation were the affected categories in S. sclerotiorum upon SsHADV-1 infection. Moreover, the infection of SsHADV-1 also suppressed the expression of antiviral RNA silencing and virulence factor genes. These results provide further detailed insights into the effects of SsHADV-1 infection on the whole genome transcription in S. sclerotiorum.

Highlights

Mycoviruses or fungal viruses are parasitic viruses in various filamentous fungi and yeasts [1]
For samples of strain DT-8 and strain DT-8VF, there were a total of 88 million and 59 million reads, of which an average of 90.30% and 95.63% reads were aligned to the S. sclerotiorum genome, respectively
Compared to the gene expression data of strain DT-8VF, a total of 3110 statistically significant differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were found in strain DT-8 with 1741 up-regulated and 1369 down-regulated (Figure 1b)

Summary

Introduction

Mycoviruses or fungal viruses are parasitic viruses in various filamentous fungi and yeasts [1]. Since the first mycovirus causing the dieback disease of Agaricus bisporus was discovered, mycoviruses have been detected in different kinds of fungi gradually [1,2]. Mycovirus-induced hypovirulence could be found in many important plant hemi-biotrophic and necrotrophic pathogenic fungi, including Aspergillus spp., Alternaria alternata, Bipolaris maydis, Botryosphaeria dothidea, Botrytis spp., Cryphonectria parasitica, Colletotrichum spp., Diaporthe spp., Fusarium spp., Helicobasidium mompa, Helminthosporium victoriae, Heterobasidion annosum, Macrophomina phaseolina, Magnaporthe oryzae, Ophiostoma spp., Penicillium digitatum, Pestalotiopsis theae, Rosellinia necatrix, Rhizoctonia solani, Sclerotinia spp. and so on [3,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19], indicating hypovirulence-related mycoviruses as potential resources to control plant fungal diseases [4]

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion