Project description:Dimorphic fungi have the ability to change morphology during their lifecycle, a crucial feature for the establishment of infection and fungal growth and development in planta. Life cycle of the dimorphic sugarcane smut fungi, Sporisorium scitamineum, involves recognition and mating of compatible saprophytic yeast-like haploid sporidia (MAT-1 and MAT-2) that upon fusion, develop into infective dikaryotic mycelia. Although the dimorphic transition is intrinsically linked with the pathogenicity and virulence of S. scitamineum, it has never been studied using a proteomics approach. In the present study, an iTRAQ-based comparative proteomic analysis of three distinct stages covering the dimorphic transition period - haploid sporidial stage (MAT-1 and MAT-2) to the transition phase (24 hours post co-culturing (hpc)) and dikaryotic mycelial stage (48 hpc) was carried out. Functional categorization showed that the most altered biological processes were energy production, primary metabolism especially carbohydrate, amino acid, fatty acid, followed by translation, post-translation and protein turnover. The identified proteins could be grouped into 8 distinct clusters with different trends in abundance. Enrichment analysis of the clusters showed that biological processes related to energy production through oxidative phosphorylation, citrate cycle, and β-oxidation, transcription, translation and redox homeostasis were specifically altered. In addition, an overall downregulation of carbohydrate metabolism and reprogrammed amino acid metabolism were observed. Several differentially abundant proteins (DAPs), especially in the dikaryotic mycelial stage were predicted as effectors. Taken together, key molecular mechanisms underpinning the dimorphic transition in S. scitamineum at the proteome level were highlighted. A catalogue of stage-specific and dimorphic transition-associated -proteins and potential effectors identified herein are potential candidates for defective mutant screening to elucidate their functional role in the dimorphic transition and pathogenicity in S. scitamineum.
Project description:According to the key words, the gene set, including oxidation-reduction, RNA silence, disease resistance, phytohormone, phosphorylation, dephosphorylation, transcription factor, receptor, kinase, ubiquitination and RNA binding,etc. from sugarcane and the whole CDS sequence from smut genome, was achieved and used as targets in the present microarray assay. Based on smut infection samples from smut-susceptible sugarcane genotype YC71-374 and smut-resistant sugarcane genotype NCo376, the hybridization was conducted and validated by real-time fluorescent quantitative PCR. It would provide a basic data for the study on sugarcane-smut interaction mechanism, which referred to sugarcane smut resistance and smut pathogenesis.
