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Role of a histone-modifying enzyme in plant immunity and tomato small RNAome
In the era of systems biology, plant biologists approach any given phenomena, that they have great interests, from different perspectives. Among them, both epigenomic and epigenetic studies give us new insights into plant immune response as well as development. In plants, recognition of invading pathogenic microorganisms by pattern recognition receptor and race-specific resistance protein activates diverse cellular responses to defend plants against pathogen infection. One of well-known immune responses is the transcriptional reprogramming occurring when pathogen infects plant. Chromatin remodeling caused by change of histone marks and replacement of histone variants affects gene expression that is important for immunity. We are focused on unveiling epigenomic and epigenetic regulatory mechanisms of plant immunity. To address these questions, we have collected knockout mutant plants whose genes might be related to histone modifications, and identified several enhanced-immune (eni) mutants and immune-defective (imd) mutants. Here, we will introduce one of mutants showing enhanced disease resistance (EDR) in response to the infection of Pseudomonas. Thus we named it eni2. Both the growth of virulent bacteria, not avirulent derivatives of Pseudomonas syringae, and symptom development were effectively inhibited in the eni2 mutants, compared with those seen in wild type. Unlike to well-known EDR-type mutants, the levels of salicylic acid in the eni2 mutant plants were not different from those in wild type. Thus we suggests a few plausible scenarios about role of ENI2 in plant immune response. To examine these possibilities, we are monitoring transcriptional reprogramming occurring in eni2 mutants through RNA-seq analysis. On the other hand, we have recently initiated the study of tomato small RNAome in order to discover immune-related small RNAs from leaves infected with Pseudomonas syringae via next-generation sequencing technology. Here we present the recent progress in this study.
