Plant–necrotroph co-transcriptome networks illuminate a metabolic battlefield

• DOI: 10.7554/elife.44279
• Publication Date: 2019-05-13T12:00:20Z
• Authors: Wei Zhang; Jason A Corwin; Daniel Harrison C...; Julie Feusier; Robert Eshbaugh; David E Cook; Suzi Atwell; Daniel J Kliebens...
• Keywords: 0301 basic medicine; 570; Biomedical and clinical sciences; QH301-705.5; Science; Arabidopsis; Plant Biology; Cyclopentanes; gene co-expression network; co-transcriptome; Infections; Microbiology; Fungal Proteins; Botrytis cinerea; 03 medical and health sciences; Gene Expression Regulation, Plant; Gene Expression Regulation, Fungal; Genetics; 2.2 Factors relating to the physical environment; 2.1 Biological and endogenous factors; Oxylipins; Aetiology; Biology (General); Plant Diseases; plant biology; 0303 health sciences; Arabidopsis Proteins; Q; R; Health sciences; Plant; Biological Sciences; Plant Leaves; Biological sciences; Infectious Diseases; Fungal; Gene Expression Regulation; A. thaliana; pathosystem; Host-Pathogen Interactions; Medicine; Biochemistry and Cell Biology; Botrytis; Infection; host-pathogen Interaction; Salicylic Acid; Transcriptome

A central goal of studying host-pathogen interaction is to understand how host and pathogen manipulate each other to promote their own fitness in a pathosystem. Co-transcriptomic approaches can simultaneously analyze dual transcriptomes during infection and provide a systematic map of the cross-kingdom communication between two species. Here we used the Arabidopsis-B. cinerea pathosystem to test how plant host and fungal pathogen interact at the transcriptomic level. We assessed the impact of genetic diversity in pathogen and host by utilization of a collection of 96 isolates infection on Arabidopsis wild-type and two mutants with jasmonate or salicylic acid compromised immunities. We identified ten B. cinereagene co-expression networks (GCNs) that encode known or novel virulence mechanisms. Construction of a dual interaction network by combining four host- and ten pathogen-GCNs revealed potential connections between the fungal and plant GCNs. These co-transcriptome data shed lights on the potential mechanisms underlying host-pathogen interaction.