Prem Kumar Ganesan 1, Eman Elagamey 2, Juan Debernardi 3, Shunyuan Xiao1 4, Nidhi Rawat 1
1. Department of Plant Science and Landscape Architecture, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 USA
2. Plant Pathology Research Institute, Agricultural Research Center (ARC), 9 Gamaa St, Giza, 12619, Egypt
3. Plant Transformation Facility, University of California, Davis, CA- 95616, USA
4. Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnology Research, Rockville, MD 20850, USA
Corresponding author: nidhirwt@umd.edu
Ganesan, Prem Kumar
Wheat pore-forming toxin-like (PFT) gene was reported by
Rawat et al. (2016) previously to provide Fhb1 mediated resistance to Fusarium
graminearum infection in resistant wheat cultivar Sumai 3. To investigate
the effect of PFT in another plant system, we ectopically expressed it in dicot
plant model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, which does not have any PFT
ortholog or homolog. PFT gene in the dicot plant Arabidopsis thaliana
provided resistance to not only F. graminearum, but to a broad-range of
necrotrophic and hemi-biotrophic fungal pathogens including Botrytis cinerea,
Colletotrichum higginsianum, and Sclerotinia sclerotiorum. In the
present work, the wheat PFT gene was transferred to a diploid tomato cv.
Moneymaker and an octaploid strawberry cv. Camerosa. Both of these varieties
are susceptible to a number of pathogens. The transgenic tomato plants were
challenged with Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. lycopersici, Verticillium
dahliae, Alternaria linariae, and Botrytis cinerea. The
transgenic strawberry plants were challenged with Botrytis cinerea and Colletotrichum
acutatum. In both the experiments, transgenic plants of PFT tomato and
strawberry showed significantly less disease severity index and fungal biomass
with significant disease resistance against the fungal pathogens tested. This
study demonstrates the broad spectrum-resistance of the wheat PFT gene to
fungal pathogens in planta irrespective of the plant background.
Keywords: Fhb1, Wheat PFT, Tomato, strawberry,
broad-spectrum resistance, Fungal pathogens.
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