Project description:Plants represent the nutritional basis of virtually all life on earth and protein-rich foods from crop plants are a global megatrend essential for sustaining an increasing human population and counteracting climate change. While the genomes of crops are increasingly elucidated, little is known about crop proteomes – the entirety of proteins that execute and control nearly every aspect of life. To address this shortcoming we optimized a protocol for mapping the proteome of different crops such as Solanum lycopersicum (tomato) fruit and included four technical replicates and three biological replicates from different tomato plants to demonstrate the robustness of the workflow.
Project description:In this study, we explored the metabolome and transcriptome of the ripe fruit in nine landrace accessions representing the seven genetic groups and compared them to the mature fruit of the wild progenitor S. pimpinellifolium. The goal is to shed light in understanding the factors responsible for acquiring tomato fruit quality (taste and flavour) at molecular level during the domestication process.
Project description:Plant pathogens with a broad host range are able to infect plant lineages that diverged over 100 million years ago. They exert similar and recurring constraints on the evolution of unrelated plant populations. Plants generally respond with quantitative disease resistance (QDR), a form of immunity relying on complex genetic determinants. In most cases, the molecular determinants of QDR and how they evolve is unknown. Here we identify in Arabidopsis thaliana a gene mediating QDR against Sclerotinia sclerotiorum, agent of the white mold disease, and provide evidence of its convergent evolution in multiple plant species. Using genome wide association mapping in A. thaliana, we associated the gene encoding the POQR prolyl-oligopeptidase with QDR against S. sclerotiorum. Loss of this gene compromised QDR against S. sclerotiorum but not against a bacterial pathogen. Natural diversity analysis associated POQR sequence with QDR. Remarkably, the same amino acid changes occurred after independent duplications of POQR in ancestors of multiple plant species, including A. thaliana and tomato. Genome-scale expression analyses revealed that parallel divergence in gene expression upon S. sclerotiorum infection is a frequent pattern in genes, such as POQR, that duplicated both in A. thaliana and tomato. Our study identifies a previously uncharacterized gene mediating QDR against S. sclerotiorum. It shows that some QDR determinants are conserved in distantly related plants and have emerged through the repeated use of similar genetic polymorphisms at different evolutionary time scales.
Project description:To characterize the PTI response of tomato and the effect of the delivery of a subset of effectors, we performed an RNA-seq analysis of tomato Rio Grande prf3 leaves challenged with either the flgII-28 peptide or the following bacterial strains: Agrobacterium tumefaciens GV2260, Pseudomonas fluorescens 55, Pseudomonas putida KT2440, Pseudomonas syringae pv. tomato (Pst) DC3000, Pst DC3000 deltahrcQ-U deltafliC and Pst DC3000 deltaavrPto deltaavrPtoB. NOTE: Samples in SRA were assigned the same sample accession. This is incorrect as there are different samples, hence âSource Nameâ was replaced with new values. Comment[ENA_SAMPLE] contains the original SRA sample accessions.