A wheat cysteine-rich receptor-like kinase confers broad-spectrum resistance against Septoria tritici blotch

10 Pág. Centro de Biotecnología y Genómica de Plantas (CBGP)
The poverty of disease resistance gene reservoirs limits the breeding of crops for durable resistance against evolutionary dynamic pathogens. Zymoseptoria tritici which causes Septoria tritici blotch (STB), represents one of the most genetically diverse and devastating wheat pathogens worldwide. No fully virulent Z. tritici isolates against synthetic wheats carrying the major resistant gene Stb16q have been identified. Here, we use comparative genomics, mutagenesis and complementation to identify Stb16q, which confers broad-spectrum resistance against Z. tritici. The Stb16q gene encodes a plasma membrane cysteine-rich receptor-like kinase that was recently introduced into cultivated wheat and which considerably slows penetration and intercellular growth of the pathogen.
Our works was supported by the “Fond de Soutien à l’Obtention Vegetale” (FSOV), the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA), and the ETH Zurich Career Seed Grant (SEED-58 16-1). We thank Sreedhar Kilaru and Gero Steinberg for providing the strain 3D7 expressing eGFP. Confocal laser scanning microscopy experiments were performed in the Scientific Center for Optical and Electron Microscopy (ScopeM), ETH Zurich and at the SPIBOC imaging facility of the Institut Sophia Agrobiotech. B.F. was supported by INRA and the French Government (National Research Agency, ANR) through the ‘Investments for the Future’ LabEx SIGNALIFE: program reference #ANR-11-LABX-0028-01.