Large-scale transcriptome comparison reveals distinct gene activations in wheat responding to stripe rust and powdery mildew

Abstract

BackgroundStripe rust (Puccinia striiformis f. sp. tritici; Pst) and powdery mildew (Blumeria graminis f. sp. tritici; Bgt) are important diseases of wheat (Triticum aestivum) worldwide. Similar mechanisms and gene transcripts are assumed to be involved in the host defense response because both pathogens are biotrophic fungi. The main objective of our study was to identify co-regulated mRNAs that show a change in expression pattern after inoculation with Pst or Bgt, and to identify mRNAs specific to the fungal stress response.ResultsThe transcriptome of the hexaploid wheat line N9134 inoculated with the Chinese Pst race CYR 31 was compared with that of the same line inoculated with Bgt race E09 at 1, 2, and 3 days post-inoculation. Infection by Pst and Bgt affected transcription of 23.8% of all T. aestivum genes. Infection by Bgt triggered a more robust alteration in gene expression in N9134 compared with the response to Pst infection. An array of overlapping gene clusters with distinctive expression patterns provided insight into the regulatory differences in the responses to Bgt and Pst infection. The differentially expressed genes were grouped into seven enriched Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes pathways in Bgt-infected leaves and four pathways in Pst-infected leaves, while only two pathways overlapped. In the plant–pathogen interaction pathway, N9134 activated a higher number of genes and pathways in response to Bgt infection than in response to Pst invasion. Genomic analysis revealed that the wheat genome shared some microbial genetic fragments, which were specifically induced in response to Bgt and Pst infection.ConclusionsTaken together, our findings indicate that the responses of wheat N9134 to infection by Bgt and Pst shows differences in the pathways and genes activated. The mass sequence data for wheat–fungus interaction generated in this study provides a powerful platform for future functional and molecular research on wheat–fungus interactions.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/1471-2164-15-898) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Quantitative proteomics reveals the central changes of wheat in response to powdery mildew

“…6). Likewise, we found that R, G, replication, recombination and repair (L), transcription (K), signal transduction mechanisms (T) and E were the main functional categories in the previous RNA-seq data [7]. However, only a few protein-species were detected in the DNA replication and transcription, nucleotide excision repair and signal transduction pathways in proteomic analysis.…”

“…The transcriptome data were obtained with the same experimental design in our previous study [7]. In the correlation analysis, we calculated the Pearson correlation coefficient (r), and divided the transcript/protein pairs into two groups based on their up-or down-accumulation of protein expression abundances (Supplementary Table 5).…”

“…Transcript profiling can reveal the transcriptional expression pattern of genes involved in defense response pathways, which can help to elucidate the defense mechanism controlled by resistance (R) genes. For example, affymetrix wheat microarrays and RNA-seq analysis have provided valuable information about globally genes expression changes in response to powdery mildew in wheat [6,7]. However, the detection of transcriptional changes cannot ensure the same tendency of the corresponding proteins expression for the existence of posttranscriptional, translational and/or posttranslational regulatory mechanisms [8,9], alternative splicing and even protein degradation [10].…”

Ca2+/Cation Antiporters (CaCA): Identification, Characterization and Expression Profiling in Bread Wheat (Triticum aestivum L.)

“…tritici (Bgt) and Puccinia striiformis f. sp. tritici (Pst), separately (Zhang et al, 2014b). The RNA seq data was generated in triplicates and expression was calculated using Trinity package as described (Haas et al, 2013).…”

“…The unavailability of genomic information, composite nature of genome and complexity in application of modern functional genomics tools could be the probable reason for the same. In recent years, the genome sequence and numerous development and stress related high throughput RNA sequence data have been available from T. aestivum (IWGSC, 2014; Zhang et al, 2014b, 2016; Liu Z. et al, 2015; Pingault et al, 2015), which enabled the genome wide characterization of various gene families (Shumayla et al, 2016a,b; Zeng et al, 2016). Since the CaCA proteins are involved in several vital functions from development to stress response, there characterization becomes essential in an important food crop like T. aestivum .…”