Adaptive regulation of miRNAs/milRNAs in tissue-specific interaction between apple and Valsa mali

Abstract

In plant-pathogen interactions, pathogens display tissue specificity, infecting and causing disease in particular tissues. However, the involvement of microRNAs/microRNA-like RNAs (miRNAs/milRNAs) in tissue-specific regulation during plant-pathogen interactions remains largely unexplored. This study investigates the differential expression of miRNAs/milRNAs, as well as their corresponding target genes, in interactions between Valsa mali (Vm) and different apple tissues. The results demonstrated that both apple miRNAs and Vm milRNAs exhibited distinct expression profiles when Vm infected bark and leaves, with functionally diverse corresponding target genes. Furthermore, one apple miRNA (Mdo-miR482a) and one Vm milRNA (Vm-milR57) were identified as exhibiting tissue-specific expression in interactions between Vm and apple bark or leaves. Mdo-miR482a was exclusively up-regulated in response to Vm infection in bark and target a nucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeat (NLR) gene of apple. When Mdo-miR482a was transiently over-expressed or silenced, the resistance was significantly reduced or improved. Similarly, transient expression of the NLR gene also showed an increase in resistance. Vm-milR57 could target two essential pathogenicity-related genes of Vm. During Vm infection in bark, the expression of Vm-milR57 was down-regulated to enhance the expression of the corresponding target gene to improve the pathogenicity. The study is the first to reveal tissue-specific characteristics of apple miRNAs and Vm milRNAs in interactions between Vm and different apple tissues, providing new insights into adaptive regulation in tissue-specific interactions between plants and fungi.

Acknowledgements

This research was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (U1903206, 32172375) and the Key Science and Technology Special Projects of Shaanxi Province (2020zdzx03-03-01). The authors would like to express their gratitude to Prof. Dongdong Niu at Nanjing Agricultural University for providing the pRS300 plasmid. The authors also extend their appreciation to Hua Zhao and Fengping Yuan from Northwest A&F University for their valuable assistance in optical microscopy. Lastly, the authors would like to acknowledge the anonymous reviewers and editors for their insightful comments, which greatly enhanced the quality of the manuscript.

Author contributions

L.H., H.F., and C.G. designed the study. C.G. analysed the data. B.Z., J.Z., X.D., J.W., Y.G., and Y.H. performed the experiments. C.G., H.F., and L.H. wrote the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Data availability

All sRNA-Seq data have been deposited in the NCBI Sequence Read Archive under project number PRJNA987183. All degradome data have been deposited in the NCBI Sequence Read Archive under project number PRJNA987192.

All the scripts and pipelines used in this study have been archived in GitHub: https://github.com/GaoChengyu/tsDEMs.

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Supplementary data

Supplementary data is available at Horticulture Research online.

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