Project description:Plant diseases induced by fungi are one of the most important limiting factors during pre- and post-harvest food production. For decades, synthetic chemical fungicides have been used to control these diseases, however, increase on worldwide regulatory policies and the demand to reduced their application, have led to search new ecofriendly alternatives such as the biostimulants. Commercial application of yeast as biocontrol, have shown low efficacy compared to synthetic fungicides, mostly due to the limited knowledge of the molecular mechanisms of yeast-induced responses. Interestingly, to date, only two genome-wide transciptomic analysis have been used to characterize the mode of action of biocontrols using the plant model Arabidopsis thaliana, missing, in our point of view, all its molecular and genomic potential. Here we described that compounds released by the biocontrol yeast Hanseniaspora opuntiae (HoFs) can protect Glycine max and Arabidopsis thaliana plants against the broad host-range necrotroph fungi Corynespora cassiicola and Botrytis cinerea, respectively. We show that HoFs have a long-lasting, dose-dependent local and systemic effect against Botrytis cinerea. Additionally, we performed a genome-wide transcriptomic analysis to identified HoFs-induced differentially expressed genes in Arabidopsis thaliana. Importantly, our work provides a novel and valuable information that can help the researchers to improve HoFs efficacy in order to become an ecofriendly alternative to synthetic fungicides
Project description:Four hybrid yeast strains isolated from a variety of industrial substrates were hybridized to an array-CGH platform containing probes to query the whole genomes of seven different Saccharomyces species. For most of the strains we found evidence of multiple interspecific hybridization events and multiple introgressed regions. The strains queried were GSY205 (isolated from a cider fermentation), GSY505 (a contaminant from a lager beer fermentation), GSY2232 (a commercial wine yeast strain), and GSY312 (a commercial lager beer strain). Additionally, 3 different rare viable spores derived from laboratory-created interspecific S. cerevisiae-S. bayanus (aka S. uvarum) hybrids were queried, before and after evolution in chemostats, via S. cerevisiae-S. bayanus microarrays.