Abstract
Verticillium dahliae causes wilt diseases and early senescence in numerous plants, including agricultural crops such as cotton. In this study, we studied two closely related V. dahliae strains, and found that V991w showed significantly reduced virulence on cotton than V991b. Comprehensive transcriptome analysis revealed various differentially expressed genes between the two strains, with more genes repressed in V991w. The downregulated genes in V991w were involved in production of hydrophobins, melanin, predicted aflatoxin, and membrane proteins, most of which are related to pathogenesis and multidrug resistance. Consistently, melanin production in V991w in vitro was compromised. We next obtained genomic variations between the two strains, demonstrating that transcription factor genes containing fungi specific transcription factor domain and fungal Zn2-Cys6 binuclear cluster domain were enriched in V991w, which might be related to pathogenicity-related genes downregulation. Thus, this study supports a model in which some virulence factors involved in V. dahliae pathogenicity were pre-expressed during in vitro growth before host interaction.
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Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to Prof. Xianlong Zhang (Huazhong Agricultural University, China) for providing the V991b strain. We are in debt to Ms. Heqin Zhu for her generous providing three cotton cultivars.
Funding
This study was supported by ABLife Inc (201206003 to Yi Z.), National Special Transgenic Project of China (No. 2016ZX08011-002 to L.J.), and also by the National key research and development program (2017YFD0201907 to L.J.). The funding had no influence over the experimental design, data analysis or interpretation, or writing the manuscript.
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Yi Z, DY, PW conceived the study, LJ cultured the two V. dahliae strains, performed the infection and disease assessment experiments. FY performed the transcriptome and DNA re-sequencing experimental work under the supervision of QW. DC performed all the transcriptome analysis, Yu Z performed the genomic data analysis. Yi Z, DC and SL interpret the data and wrote the manuscript. All authors have read and approved the final version of the manuscript.
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D.C., S.L., F.Y., Yu Z., Q.W. and Yi Z. are employed by ABLife Inc. PW, LJ and DY are employed by Hubei Academy of Agricultural Sciences. The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
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Jin, L., Chen, D., Liao, S. et al. Transcriptome analysis reveals downregulation of virulence-associated genes expression in a low virulence Verticillium dahliae strain. Arch Microbiol 201, 927–941 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00203-019-01663-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00203-019-01663-7