Abstract
The ascomycete fungus Beauveria bassiana is a natural pathogen of hundreds of insect species and is commercially produced as an environmentally friendly mycoinsecticide. Many genes involved in fungal insecticide infection have been identified but few have been further explored. In this study, we constructed three transcriptomes of B. bassiana at 24, 48 and 72 h post infection of insect pests (BbI) or control (BbC). There were 3148, 3613 and 4922 genes differentially expressed at 24, 48 and 72 h post BbI/BbC infection, respectively. A large number of genes and pathways involved in infection were identified. To further analyze those genes, expression patterns across different infection stages (0, 12, 24, 36, 48, 60, 72 and 84 h) were studied using quantitative RT-PCR. This analysis showed that the infection-related genes could be divided into four patterns: highly expressed throughout the whole infection process (thioredoxin 1); highly expressed during early stages of infection but lowly expressed after the insect death (adhesin protein Mad1); lowly expressed during early infection but highly expressed after insect death (cation transporter, OpS13); or lowly expressed across the entire infection process (catalase protein). The data provide novel insights into the insect–pathogen interaction and help to uncover the molecular mechanisms involved in fungal infection of insect pests.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Jiangsu provincial policy guidance program (Grant No. BY2015024-04), Key Department of Education Science Research Project of Jiangsu Province (Grant No. 15KJA180008) and Anhui Medical University Science Foundation (2017fyzd006).
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Communicated by Olaf Kniemeyer.
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203_2017_1456_MOESM1_ESM.tif
Fig. S1 Schematic illustrating the infection process of entomopathogenic fungi. A, Spore adhesion and host recognition: adhesin protein MAD1 mediates spore adhesion and tetraspanin mediates signal transduction in this progress. B, Infection structure differentiation: the cAMP-dependent protein kinase A mediates the MAPK pathways which are involved in appressorium formation, and the mitogen-activated protein kinase MaHog1 mediates the PKA pathways which are involved in appressorium maturation. C, Detoxification of insect cuticle compounds: thioredoxin genes are involved in antioxidative stresses. D, Evasion of host immunity and occupation of the whole insect: During this process, fungal cells secrete effectors and secondary metabolites (such as oosporein, a red-pigmented benzoquinone, can function as effector to inhibit PPO activity and downregulate host expression of antifungal peptides) to evade host immunity by counteracting host receptors (resistant proteins) and antimicrobial compound to limit microbial competition (TIF 515 KB)
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Chen, A., Wang, Y., Shao, Y. et al. Genes involved in Beauveria bassiana infection to Galleria mellonella . Arch Microbiol 200, 541–552 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00203-017-1456-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00203-017-1456-0
Keywords
- Beauveria bassiana
- Infection
- Transcriptome
- RNA-Seq
- Quantitative RT-PCR