Ayooshi Mitra, Amity University Kolkata
The production of cereal crops is deeply threatened, throughout the world by seed-borne bacterial diseases. Locally occurring disease resistance remains unclear in different crops. In this study conducted by Matsumoto et. al, it has been observed that under the same pathogen pressure, rice plants of the same cultivar can be distinguished into disease-resistant and susceptible phenotypes. Integration of high-throughput data, gene mutagenesis, and molecular interaction assays facilitated the discovery of the underlying model of action, after the identification of a seed-endophytic bacterium as the resistance-conferring agent. Accumulated and transmitted across generations in disease-resistant rice seeds, Sphingomonas melonis confers resistance through the production of anthranilic acid to disease-susceptible phenotypes. Anthranilic acid interferes with the seed-borne pathogen Burkholderia plantar’s sigma factor RpoS without affecting cell growth, possibly leading to impairment of upstream cascades that are required for the biosynthesis of the virulence factor. In the phytopathology paradigm of ‘disease triangles’ which encompass the plant, pathogens, and environmental conditions, the overall results of this study highlight the hidden role of seed endophytes. For modern crop cultivation, threatened by globally widespread bacterial diseases, these insights are potentially exploitable.
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Source: Matsumoto, H., Fan, X., Wang, Y. et al. Bacterial seed endophyte shapes disease resistance in rice. Nat. Plants (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-020-00826-5
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