Genomics of Plant Disease Resistance in Legumes

Abstract

The constant interactions between plants and pathogens in the environment and the resulting outcomes are of significant importance for agriculture and agricultural scientists. Disease resistance genes in plant cultivars can break down in the field due to the evolution of pathogens under high selection pressure. Thus, the protection of crop plants against pathogens is a continuous arms race. Like any other type of crop plant, legumes are susceptible to many pathogens. The dawn of the genomic era, in which high-throughput and cost-effective genomic tools have become available, has revolutionized our understanding of the complex interactions between legumes and pathogens. Genomic tools have enabled a global view of transcriptome changes during these interactions, from which several key players in both the resistant and susceptible interactions have been identified. This review summarizes some of the large-scale genomic studies that have clarified the host transcriptional changes during interactions between legumes and their plant pathogens while highlighting some of the molecular breeding tools that are available to introgress the traits into breeding programs. These studies provide valuable insights into the molecular basis of different levels of host defenses in resistant and susceptible interactions.

Untangling the Pea Root Rot Complex Reveals Microbial Markers for Plant Health

“…Repeated experimental evidence supports the importance of pathogen complexes for the pea (Kerr, 1963;Shehata et al, 1983;Oyarzun and Van Loon, 1989;Xue, 2003;Wille et al, 2020) and other plant pathosystems (Lamichhane and Venturi, 2015;Abdullah et al, 2017). Notably, interactions of pathogens have significant implications for disease aetiology (Kerr, 1963;Willsey et al, 2018), plant resistance (Kankanala et al, 2019), and disease management (Gossen et al, 2016;You and Barbetti, 2019). Our results demonstrated that the composition of key microbial taxa of the PRRC in diseased pea roots was determined by conjoint effects of the soil and plant genotype.…”

New insights from short and long reads sequencing to explore cytochrome b variants of Plasmopara viticola populations collected in vineyard and related to resistance to complex III inhibitors

“…ONT reveals an interesting tool for plants surveillance to detect plant virus routinely [47]. Finally, large-scale genomics studies of plant disease resistance were possible thanks to these high-throughput and cost-effective tools to clarify the interactions between legumes and pathogens [48]. At a gene scale, only few studies already reported successful cyt b sequencing by short-read NGS method for the purpose of pathogen resistance to fungicides studies.…”

Genetic Transformation in Agro-Economically Important Legumes

“…The model legumes, soybean, and vetch (Aeschynomene evenia) are amongst plants that have been successfully transformed using this method [57]. Wang et al [57] and Kankanala et al [67] mention that the first application of the CRISPR/Cas9 technology was done using Agrobacterium rhizogenes, which resulted in the successful editing of both exogenous and endogenous DNA sequences. Explants that have been used for this purpose include callus tissue, leaf discs, flower tissue, and protoplasts, all of which are said to enable inheritance of the edited genome by the progeny, i.e., lead to stable transformation [66].…”