Powdery mildew fungal effector candidates share N-terminal Y/F/WxC-motif

BMC Genomics

Research Article

Jeppe Emmersen¹  Dale Godfrey²  Henrik Böhlenius²  Ziguo Zhang²  Carsten Pedersen²  Hans Thordal-Christensen² 

[1] Department of Health Science and Technology, Aalborg University, Denmark;Plant and Soil Science Laboratory, Department of Agricultural and Ecology, Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Denmark;

关键词: Powdery Mildew;    Rust Fungus;    Rust Pathogen;    Powdery Mildew Fungus;    Effector Candidate;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2164-11-317

 received in 2010-01-14, accepted in 2010-05-20,  发布年份 2010

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundPowdery mildew and rust fungi are widespread, serious pathogens that depend on developing haustoria in the living plant cells. Haustoria are separated from the host cytoplasm by a plant cell-derived extrahaustorial membrane. They secrete effector proteins, some of which are subsequently transferred across this membrane to the plant cell to suppress defense.ResultsIn a cDNA library from barley epidermis containing powdery mildew haustoria, two-thirds of the sequenced ESTs were fungal and represented ~3,000 genes. Many of the most highly expressed genes encoded small proteins with N-terminal signal peptides. While these proteins are novel and poorly related, they do share a three-amino acid motif, which we named "Y/F/WxC", in the N-terminal of the mature proteins. The first amino acid of this motif is aromatic: tyrosine, phenylalanine or tryptophan, and the last is always cysteine. In total, we identified 107 such proteins, for which the ESTs represent 19% of the fungal clones in our library, suggesting fundamental roles in haustoria function. While overall sequence similarity between the powdery mildew Y/F/WxC-proteins is low, they do have a highly similar exon-intron structure, suggesting they have a common origin. Interestingly, searches of public fungal genome and EST databases revealed that haustoria-producing rust fungi also encode large numbers of novel, short proteins with signal peptides and the Y/F/WxC-motif. No significant numbers of such proteins were identified from genome and EST sequences from either fungi which do not produce haustoria or from haustoria-producing Oomycetes.ConclusionIn total, we identified 107, 178 and 57 such Y/F/WxC-proteins from the barley powdery mildew, the wheat stem rust and the wheat leaf rust fungi, respectively. All together, our findings suggest the Y/F/WxC-proteins to be a new class of effectors from haustoria-producing pathogenic fungi.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Godfrey et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2010. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.