Plants trigger a highly orchestrated defence mechanism in response to viral infection. In this study, we aimed at understanding the molecular events that lead to more accelerated cell death in Nicotiana benthamiana plants infected with the fast-replicating TMV 24A + UPD in comparison to TMV. TMV 24A + UPD is an artificial mutant that induces more severe symptoms leading to...
Neonicotinoid insecticides are used for preventing insects from transmitting plant viruses. This group of chemicals are easily taken up by plants and translocated to different tissues and are applicable for soil treatment in sustained-release tablets, which greatly reduces environmental contamination compared to foliar spray. The goal of this study was to examine the efficacy of...
Wheat dwarf virus (WDV), a mastrevirus transmitted by the leafhopper Psammotettix alienus, causes a severe disease in cereal crops. Typical symptoms of wheat plants infected by WDV are yellowing and severe dwarfing. In this present study, RNA-Seq was used to perform gene expression analysis in wheat plants in response to WDV infection. Comparative transcriptome analysis indicated...
Diseases caused by Phytophthora species seriously affect global crop production and food security. Identification of key factors involved in plant resistance is valuable for disease management. Previously, we characterized the transcriptome of Nicotiana benthamiana which was infected with Phytophthora parasitica. Here, we selected NbERF173, one of the most strongly up-regulated...
Effective use of biocontrol agents (BCAs) is a potentially important component of sustainable agriculture. The ecological processes determining the success of biocontrol are complex, which may partly explain the limited success of biocontrol against plant diseases in field crops. Understanding the ecological characteristics of BCAs in addition to biocontrol mechanisms and direct...
Reactive oxygen species (ROS) signaling plays a central role in plant immune response. BPAs, referred to as binding partner 1 of accelerated cell death 11 (ACD11) (BPA1) and BPA1-like proteins, regulate ROS-mediated defense responses in Arabidopsis thaliana. However, their distribution and evolutionary characteristics in the plant lineage remain unexplored. In this study, we...
Effective use of biocontrol agents (BCAs) is a potentially important component of sustainable agriculture. The ecological processes determining the success of biocontrol are complex, which may partly explain the limited success of biocontrol against plant diseases in field crops. Understanding the ecological characteristics of BCAs in addition to biocontrol mechanisms and direct...
Plants trigger a highly orchestrated defence mechanism in response to viral infection. In this study, we aimed at understanding the molecular events that lead to more accelerated cell death in Nicotiana benthamiana plants infected with the fast-replicating TMV 24A + UPD in comparison to TMV. TMV 24A + UPD is an artificial mutant that induces more severe symptoms leading to...
Pseudomonas syringae is the most frequently emerging group of plant pathogenic bacteria. Because this bacterium is ubiquitous as an epiphyte and on various substrates in non-agricultural settings, there are many questions about how to assess the risk for plant disease posed by strains in the environment. Although P. syringae is considered to have discrete host ranges in defined...
Glycine-rich proteins (GRPs) have diverse amino acid sequences and are involved in a variety of biological processes. The role of GRPs in plant pathogenic fungi has not been reported. In this study, we identified and functionally characterized a novel gene named MoGRP1 in Magnaporthe oryzae, which encodes a protein that has an N-terminal RNA recognition motif (RRM) and a C...
Salicylic acid (SA) plays a crucial regulatory role in plant immunity. NPR1 (non-expressor of pathogenesis related-1) is a SA receptor and plays a pivotal role in SA signaling. However, pathogen effectors which target NPR1 to promote infection have rarely been reported. Here, we identified a Phytophthora capsici effector RxLR48 that associates with NPR1, facilitates P. capsici...
The serological method is one of the most important techniques extensively used in crop production to detect different pathogens, especially plant viruses. An antiserum is essential for serological tests. The 17 kDa movement protein (MP) of Potato leafroll virus (PLRV) is related to the membranous structures and localized to the plasmodesmata, but there is no report on...
Soybean (Glycine max) seedlings with symptoms of Pythium damping-off were collected in northeastern Iowa soybean fields and processed for isolation of the causal agents on both potato dextrose agar (PDA) and pimaricin-, ampicillin-, rifampicin-, and pentachloronitrobenzene (PARP)-containing media. Isolates were identified based on morphological characteristics, growth rates...
Benzimidazole fungicides (MBCs) have been widely used in agriculture since 1970s, and resistance to this class of fungicides in Botrytis cinerea is reported worldwide. Resistance to MBCs in B. cinerea is related to mutations in the target β-tubulin gene (TUB2). Compared with the mutation at codon 200, the substitutions from glutamic acid to alanine (E198A), valine (E198V), or...
Clustered, regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats/CRISPR-associated proteins (CRISPR/Cas) based genome editing technology has been developed from the adaptive immune system used by many bacteria and archaea for combating against viruses. Here, we utilize the Cas9 with dual gRNAs designed to target two essential regions of the single-stranded DNA genome of the Cotton Leaf...
Plasmodiophora brassicae is an important biotrophic eukaryotic plant pathogen and a member of the rhizarian protists. This biotrophic pathogen causes clubroot in cruciferous plants via novel intracellular mechanisms that are markedly different from those of other biotrophic organisms. To date, genomes from six single spore isolates of P. brassicae have been sequenced. An accurate...
Puccinia striiformis Westend. is an obligate biotrophic parasite that could infect wheat and grasses to cause stripe rusts. P. striiformis, a species of rust fungi, is divided into several formae speciales based on host specialization, including P. striiformis f. sp. tritici, P. striiformis f. sp. hordei, P. striiformis f. sp. elymi, P. striiformis f. sp. agropyri, and P...
Phytophthora sojae is an important plant pathogen affecting soybean crops worldwide. The specific mechanisms this pathogen uses to penetrate the host cell and initiate infection have not been fully elucidated. However, a greater understanding of the molecular mechanisms that facilitate these processes will be critical to the development of novel strategies to control this...
Phospholipids are major structural components of all cell membranes and participate in energy storage, signal transduction and environmental adaptability in eukaryotes. To date, the enzymes involved in phospholipid biosynthesis have been well characterized in budding yeast. However, their functions in filamentous fungi are largely unclear, especially their contribution to the...
Gray mold, caused by Botrytis cinerea, is one of the most destructive diseases of strawberry in China. For resistance monitoring, 198 B. cinerea isolates were collected from strawberry greenhouses at 10 locations in Hubei Province. The isolates were screened for resistance to fungicides procymidone and zoxamide. In mycelium growth assays for procymidone, the mean values of...
Oomycete pathogens secrete hundreds of effectors, including avirulence proteins that trigger host genotype-specific resistance response, to manipulate host immunity and facilitate infection. Sequence and expression variations of avirulence genes in pathogens are well known to be responsible for loss of host genotype-specific disease resistance. However, little is known on the...
Transcription profiling assays have revealed substantial changes in gene expression during plant-microbe interactions, but it is often time- and labor-consuming to define the causative roles of the differentially expressed genes that finetune the plant responses to diverse pathogens. We improved the duplex-specific nuclease-mediated transcriptome subtraction method and integrated...
Fusarium wilt, caused by the soil-borne fungal pathogen, Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense (Foc), is considered as one of the most threatening diseases of banana. The Cavendish variety, resistant to Foc race 1 (R1), is susceptible to tropical race 4 (TR4), an aggressive race of the pathogen which is of increasing concern worldwide. Previous studies have revealed that plant small...
Ralstonia solanacearum causes a lethal bacterial wilt disease in numerous plants including important vegetable crops such as eggplant and tomato. One of the difficulties in studying virulence of this bacterium in different host plants is the development of an easy and stable pathogenicity assay. Recently we described a leaf-clip inoculation method to study its pathogenicity at...