Host‐induced gene silencing of Sporisorium scitamineum enhances resistance to smut in sugarcane

作者：Haoming Wu, Jinfeng Qiu, Peiran Zhang, Shan Lu, Jiaorong Meng, Xuecheng Huang, Ru Li, Baoshan Chen · 发表于：Plant Biotechnology Journal · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1111/pbi.14562 · 被引用次数：7 · 研究领域：Sugarcane Cultivation and Processing、Biofuel production and bioconversion、Plant Pathogenic Bacteria Studies

Sugarcane smut disease, caused by the basidiomycetous fungus Sporisorium scitamineum, is one of the major threats to the sugarcane industry. The potential method to control smut disease in sugarcane is the cultivation of resistant sugarcane varieties (Bhuiyan et al., 2021). However, development of smut-resistant sugarcane still faces big challenges due to the allopolyploid nature and complex genetic background of sugarcane. To date, functional genomics of sugarcane is far behind those of major crops, for example, wheat and rice, and few genes have been identified that can be used as resistant resources for disease resistance breeding. Host-induced gene silencing (HIGS) technology has become one of the practical methods of developing disease-resistant crops, where transgenic plants produce small interference RNAs (siRNAs) to silence essential pathogen genes (Koch and Wassenegger, 2021). However, application of HIGS to control fungal diseases has not been reported in sugarcane. Here, we assessed the potential of HIGS for engineering sugarcane against smut through silencing of fungal-specific gene of S. scitamineum. Based on our previous transcriptomic results, a fungal-specific gene SsGlcP encoding beta-1,6-glucanase precursor (SPSC_05923) showed induced expression during S. scitamineum infection (Liu et al., 2022). qRT-PCR analysis also confirmed this expression pattern (Figure 1a), suggesting that SsGlcP may play an important role for infection of S. scitamineum. Several stud...