Immune receptor genes and pericentromeric transposons as targets of common epigenetic regulatory elements

CAMBIAGNO D; NOTA F; ZAVALLO D; RIUS S; CASATTI P; ASURMENDI S; ALVAREZ MARÍA E

PLANT JOURNAL

WILEY-BLACKWELL PUBLISHING, INC

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2018 vol. 96 p. 1178 - 1178

0960-7412

attern recognition receptors (PRR) and nucleotide-binding leucine-richrepeat proteins (NLR) are major components of the plant immune systemresponsible for pathogen detection. To date, the transcriptional regulation ofPRR/NLR genes is poorly understood. Some PRR/NLR genes are affected byepigenetic changes of neighboring transposable elements (TEs) (cis-regulation).We analyzed whether these genes can also respond to changes in the epigeneticmarks of distal pericentromeric TEs (trans-regulation). We found that Arabidopsis tissues infected with Pseudomonas syringae pv. tomato (Pst) initially induced the expression of pericentromeric TEs, and then repressed it by RNA-directed DNA methylation (RdDM). The latter response was accompanied by the accumulation of small RNAs (sRNAs) mapping to the TEs. Curiously these sRNAs also mapped to distal PRR/NLR genes, which were controlled by RdDM but remained induced in the infected tissues. Then, we used non-infected mom1 (Morpheus? molecule 1) mutants