Triggering the biocontrol of Botrytis cinerea by Trichoderma harzianum through inhibition of pathogenicity and virulence related proteins

Abstract

This study reports a strain of Trichoderma harzianum CCTCC-SBW0162 with potential to enhance biocontrol activity against gray mold pathogen, Botrytis cinerea, and with a pivotal role in tomato (Solanum esculentum) plant growth enhancement. A total of 254 Trichoderma isolates were screened by in vitro antagonistic assay. Of these, 10 were selected for greenhouse experiments based on their greater inhibition of B. cinerea. The in vitro antagonistic assay and greenhouse experiments indicated that T. harzianum CCTCC-SBW0162 gave the highest inhibition rate (90.6%) and disease reduction (80.7%). Also, to study the possible mechanism associated with antifungal activity of CCTCC-SBW0162 against B. cinerea, molecular docking was used to assess the interactions between CCTCC-SBW0162-derived metabolites, and pathogencity and virulence related proteins of B. cinerea. The molecular docking results indicated that the combination of harzianopyridone, harzianolide and anthraquinone C derived from CCTCC-SBW0162 could synergistically improve antifungal activity against B. cinerea through the inhibition/modification of pathogenicity and virulence related proteins. However, this computerized modeling work emphasized the need for further study in the laboratory to confirm the effect T. harzianum-derived metabolites against the proteins of B. cinerea and their interactions.

Keywords

anthraquinone / Botrytis cinerea / harzianolide / harzianopyridone / molecular docking / Trichoderma harzianum

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Supplementary materials

The online version of this article at https://doi.org/10.15302/J-FASE-2018214 contains supplementary materials (Table S1; Fig. S1).

This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2017YFD0200400, 2017YFD0201108, SQ2017ZY06102), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (20090073110048), the National Modern Agriculture Industry Technique Systems (CARS-02), Special Project of Basic Work Project for Science and Technology (2014FY120900).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Kandasamy Saravanakumar, Zhixiang Lu, Hai Xia, Meng Wang, Jianan Sun, Shaoqing Wang, Qiang-qiang Wang, Yaqian Li, and Jie Chen declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose.

This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2018. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)