Abstract
Trichoderma harzianum is a well-known biological control agent (BCA) that shows great potential in controlling many pathogenic fungi. To screen for genes associated with mycoparasitism, we sequenced and analyzed the transcriptome of T. harzianum T4 grown in dual culture with Colletotrichum musae. We analyzed differentially expressed genes (DEGs) of Trichoderma harzianum T4 in three different culture periods: before contact (BC), during contact (C) and after contact (AC). A total of 1453 genes were significantly differentially expressed compared to when T. harzianum T4 was cultured alone. During the three periods of double culture of T. harzianum T4 with C. musae, 74, 516, and 548 genes were up-regulated, respectively, and 11, 315, and 216 genes were down-regulated, respectively. The DEGs were screened using GO and KEGG enrichment analyses combined with differential expression multiples. Six gene categories related to mycoparasitism were screened: (a) pathogen recognition and signal transduction, (b) hydrolases, (c) ribosomal proteins and secreted proteins, (d) multidrug-resistant proteins and transporters, (e) heat shock proteins and detoxification, and (f) oxidative stress and antibiotics-related genes. The expression levels of 24 up-regulated genes during T. harzianum T4’s antagonistic interaction with C. musae were detected via real-time fluorescence quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR). This study provided information on the transcriptional expression of T. harzianum T4 against C. musae. These results may help us to further understand the mechanism of mycoparasitism, which can provide a potential molecular target for improving the biological control capacity of T. harzianum T4.
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Data availability
Raw data for the sequencing and assembly of the T. harzianum T4 genome is available through the NCBI Sequence Read Archive (SRA) with BioProjec: PRJNA715015. Raw data for the sequencing and assembly of the T. harzianum T4 RNA-seq data are available through the NCBI Sequence Read Archive (SRA) with BioProjec: PRJNA1009255.
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This work was supported by the Project of Prospering Agriculture through Science and Technology of Shanghai, China (Grant number 2022-02-08-00-12-F01163).
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YW: conceptualization, methodology, software, writing—original draft preparation, data curation and writing—reviewing and editing. JW: data curation, conceptualization and writing—original draft preparation. WW: supervision, validation, writing—reviewing and editing, project administration and funding acquisition.
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Wang, Y., Wang, J. & Wang, W. Identification of mycoparasitism-related genes in Trichoderma harzianum T4 that are active against Colletotrichum musae. Arch Microbiol 206, 29 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00203-023-03767-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00203-023-03767-7