XA21-specific induction of stress-related genes following Xanthomonas infection of detached rice leaves

Nicholas C Thomas; Benjamin Schwessinger; Furong Liu; Huamin Chen; Tong Wei; Yen P Nguyen; Isaac W F Shaker; Pamela C Ronald

doi:10.7717/peerj.2446

XA21-specific induction of stress-related genes following Xanthomonas infection of detached rice leaves

PeerJ. 2016 Sep 28:4:e2446. doi: 10.7717/peerj.2446. eCollection 2016.

Authors

Nicholas C Thomas^#^{1

2}, Benjamin Schwessinger^#^{1

2

3}, Furong Liu^{1

2}, Huamin Chen^{1

4}, Tong Wei^{1

2}, Yen P Nguyen¹, Isaac W F Shaker¹, Pamela C Ronald^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Plant Pathology and the Genome Center, University of California, Davis, CA, United States.
² Joint BioEnergy Institute, Emeryville, CA, United States.
³ Research School of Biology, Australian National University, Acton, Australia.
⁴ State Key Laboratory for Biology of Plant Diseases and Insect Pests, Institute of Plant Protection, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Bejing, China.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

The rice XA21 receptor kinase confers robust resistance to the bacterial pathogen Xanthomonas oryzaepv. oryzae (Xoo). We developed a detached leaf infection assay to quickly and reliably measure activation of the XA21-mediated immune response using genetic markers. We used RNA sequencing of elf18 treated EFR:XA21:GFP plants to identify candidate genes that could serve as markers for XA21 activation. From this analysis, we identified eight genes that are up-regulated in both in elf18 treated EFR:XA21:GFP rice leaves and Xoo infected XA21 rice leaves. These results provide a rapid and reliable method to assess bacterial-rice interactions.

Keywords: EFR; RNAseq; Rice; XA21; Xanthomonas.

Grants and funding

This work was part of the DOE Joint BioEnergy Institute (http://www.jbei.org) supported by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research, through contract DE-AC02-05CH11231 between Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the US Department of Energy. This work was also supported by the NIH (GM59962). BS was supported by a Human Frontiers Science Program long-term postdoctoral fellowship (LT000674/2012) and a Discovery Early Career Award (DE150101897). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.