SummaryThe Arabidopsis gene RESISTANCE TO POWDERY MILDEW8.1 (RPW8.1) confers resistance to virulent fungal and oomycete pathogens that cause powdery mildew and downy mildew, respectively. However, the underlying mechanism remains unclear. Here, we show that ectopic expression of RPW8.1 boosts pattern‐triggered immunity (PTI) resulting in enhanced resistance against different pathogens in both Arabidopsis and rice. In Arabidopsis, transcriptome analysis revealed that ectopic expression of RPW8.1‐YFP constitutively up‐regulates expression of many pathogen‐associated molecular pattern (PAMP‐)‐inducible genes. Consistently, upon PAMP application, the transgenic line expressing RPW8.1‐YFP exhibited more pronounced PTI responses such as callose deposition, production of reactive oxygen species, expression of defence‐related genes and hypersensitive response‐like cell death. Accordingly, the growth of a virulent bacterial pathogen was significantly inhibited in the transgenic lines expressing RPW8.1‐YFP. Conversely, impairment of the PTI signalling pathway from PAMP cognition to the immediate downstream relay of phosphorylation abolished or significantly compromised RPW8.1‐boosted PTI responses. In rice, heterologous expression of RPW8.1‐YFP also led to enhanced resistance to the blast fungus Pyricularia oryzae (syn. Magnaporthe oryzae) and the bacterial pathogen Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae (Xoo). Taken together, our data suggest a surprising mechanistic connection between RPW8.1 function and PTI, and demonstrate the potential of RPW8.1 as a transgene for engineering disease resistance across wide taxonomic lineages of plants.

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Topic distillation on the Web, namely, finding quality information sources related to a given query topic with hyperlink analysis, has been shown to be useful in Web IR. Based on the analysis of three deficiencies of classical topic distillation algorithm HITS, this paper presents an improved model and algorithm named sHITSc. Given a query topic, the improved algorithm can model a neighborhood graph at site granularity, compute the relevance weights of the nodes to the topic with content analysis, and apply weighted I/O operations in its iterative hyperlink analysis. Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that s-HITSc can control topic drift and identify more reasonable and meaningful authority and hub sites on a given topic.