Stacking potato NLR genes activates a calcium‐dependent protein kinase and confers broad‐spectrum disease resistance to late blight

作者：Xiaoqiang Zhao, Fan Zhang, Xiaoqing Chen, Chongyuan Zhang, Haoyi Zhang, Tian Wang, Jinzhe Zhang, Cheng He, Shuo Wang, X. Zhang, Xi Meng, Vladimir Nekrasov, Liang Kong, Suomeng Dong · 发表于：Journal of Integrative Plant Biology · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1111/jipb.13892 · 被引用次数：16 · 研究领域：Plant-Microbe Interactions and Immunity、Plant Pathogens and Resistance、Plant Pathogens and Fungal Diseases

Late blight, caused by the oomycete plant pathogen Phytophthora infestans, is a destructive disease that leads to significant yield loss in potatoes and tomatoes. The introgression of disease resistance (R) genes, which encode nucleotide-binding domain leucine-rich repeat-containing receptors (NLRs), into cultivated potatoes, is highly effective in controlling late blight. Here, we generated transgenic 2R and 3R potato lines by stacking R genes Rpi-blb2/Rpi-vnt1.1 and Rpi-vnt1.1/RB/R8, respectively, in the susceptible cv. Desiree background. The resulting 2R and 3R transgenic potato plants showed resistance to highly virulent P. infestans field isolates. We hypothesized that stacking R genes either resulted in up-regulation of a broader range of immune-related genes, or, more importantly, increase in the fold change of gene expression. To test our hypotheses, we performed transcriptome analysis and identified a subset of core immune-related genes that are induced in response to P. infestans in transgenic lines carrying single R genes versus lines carrying stacks of multiple R genes. In our analysis, stacking R genes resulted not only in the induction of a broader range of defense-associated genes but also a global increase in gene expression fold change, caused by the pathogen. We further demonstrated that the calcium-dependent protein kinase 16 (StCDPK16) gene significantly contributed to resistance to a virulent P. infestans strain, in the R gene background, in a kinase act...