Plant Sciences Division, Research School of Biology, The Australian National University , Canberra, ACT, Australia.
Plant Pathology Group, Institute of Integrative Biology , ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
Front Plant Sci. 2015 Feb 24;6:102. doi: 10.3389/fpls.2015.00102. eCollection 2015.
We examine the contribution of next generation sequencing (NGS) to our understanding of the interaction between the fungal pathogen Zymoseptoria tritici and its wheat host. Recent interspecific whole genome comparisons between Z. tritici and its close relatives provide evidence that Z. tritici has undergone strong adaptive evolution, which is attributed to specialization by Z. tritici on wheat. We also assess the contribution of recent RNA sequencing datasets toward identifying pathogen genes and mechanisms critical for disease. While these studies have yet to report a major effector gene, they illustrate that assembling reads to the reference genome is a robust method to identify fungal transcripts from in planta infections. They also highlight the strong influence that the wheat cultivar has on effector gene expression. Lastly, we suggest future directions for NGS-guided approaches to address largely unanswered questions related to cultivar and lifecycle dependent gene expression and propose that future experiments with Z. tritici be conducted on a single wheat cultivar to enable comparisons across experiments.
我们研究了下一代测序 (NGS) 技术对我们理解真菌病原体禾谷丝核菌与其小麦宿主之间相互作用的贡献。最近禾谷丝核菌与其近亲之间的种间全基因组比较提供了证据，表明禾谷丝核菌经历了强烈的适应性进化，这归因于禾谷丝核菌对小麦的特化。我们还评估了最近的 RNA 测序数据集在识别对疾病至关重要的病原体基因和机制方面的贡献。虽然这些研究尚未报告主要的效应因子基因，但它们表明将读取序列组装到参考基因组是一种从体内感染中鉴定真菌转录本的可靠方法。它们还突出了小麦品种对效应基因表达的强烈影响。最后，我们为 NGS 指导的方法提出了未来的方向，以解决与品种和生命周期相关的基因表达相关的大量未解决的问题，并提出未来在单一小麦品种上进行禾谷丝核菌实验，以实现跨实验的比较。
