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Review
. 2019 Jan 15;20(2):335.
doi: 10.3390/ijms20020335.

Evolution of Disease Defense Genes and Their Regulators in Plants

Rongzhi Zhang  1 , Fengya Zheng  2 , Shugen Wei  3 , Shujuan Zhang  4 , Genying Li  5 , Peijian Cao  6 , Shancen Zhao  7   8
Affiliations
Review

Evolution of Disease Defense Genes and Their Regulators in Plants

Rongzhi Zhang et al. Int J Mol Sci. .

Abstract

Biotic stresses do damage to the growth and development of plants, and yield losses for some crops. Confronted with microbial infections, plants have evolved multiple defense mechanisms, which play important roles in the never-ending molecular arms race of plant⁻pathogen interactions. The complicated defense systems include pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMP) triggered immunity (PTI), effector triggered immunity (ETI), and the exosome-mediated cross-kingdom RNA interference (CKRI) system. Furthermore, plants have evolved a classical regulation system mediated by miRNAs to regulate these defense genes. Most of the genes/small RNAs or their regulators that involve in the defense pathways can have very rapid evolutionary rates in the longitudinal and horizontal co-evolution with pathogens. According to these internal defense mechanisms, some strategies such as molecular switch for the disease resistance genes, host-induced gene silencing (HIGS), and the new generation of RNA-based fungicides, have been developed to control multiple plant diseases. These broadly applicable new strategies by transgene or spraying ds/sRNA may lead to reduced application of pesticides and improved crop yield.

Keywords: CKRI; ETI; HIGS; PTI; SIGS; disease resistance gene; miRNA regulation.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as potential conflicts of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Categories of the genes/regulators in the three defense layers in plants. The data was downloaded from PRGdb database and the recent publications [20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60,61,62]. PTI: pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMP) triggered immunity; ETI: effector-triggered immunity; CRKI: cross-kingdom RNA interference.
Figure 2
Figure 2
The interaction mechanisms of plants-pathogens from three interacted and miRNA regulation layers. (A) The three defensive layers in plants including the PTI, ETI, and cross-kingdom RNA interference (CKRI), and the three infection layers in pathogens including pattern recognition receptors (PRR), effector and CKRI. (B) The evolution of NBS-LRR genes and their regulator miRNAs. (C) The three strategies of defense to biotic stresses including uORF [83], host-induced gene silencing (HIGS) [84,85,86,87,88,89,90,91,92] and spray-induced gene silencing (SIGS) [3,93,94,95,96] in plants.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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