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ARS Home » Southeast Area » Poplarville, Mississippi » Southern Horticultural Research Unit » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #307312
Title: Transcriptomes that confer to plant defense against powdery mildew disease in Lagerstroemia indica

Author
item WANG, XINWANG - Texas A&M University
item SHI, WEIBING - Bayer Corporation
item Rinehart, Timothy - Tim

Submitted to: International Journal of Genomics
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 5/6/2015
Publication Date: 7/9/2015
Citation: Xinwang, X., Weibing, S., Rinehart, T. Transcriptomes that confer to plant defense against powdery mildew disease in Lagerstroemia indica. International Journal of Genomics 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/528395. 2015.

Interpretive Summary:

Technical Abstract: The genus Lagerstroemia (common name crape myrtle) is a deciduous shrub or small tree, originaly native to southeast Asia and has became one of the most distinctive and popular summer flowering woody ornamentals anywhere south of USDA from east to west coast. Powdery mildew was one of the most serious disease problems of crape myrtle in the U.S. Disease resistant breeding in crape myrtle has been achieved significant achievements since another species L. fauriei being introduced into breeding program. However, development of genetic resources for genomic-based breeding in this species has lagged behind other crops. Recent advances in next generation sequencing technologies have enabled the development of genetic resources for plants. In this study, we used RNA-seq technology to investigate and compare transcriptomes in powdery mildew resistant (Carolina Beauty) and susceptible (Natchez) L. indica cultivars to generate the leave-responsive gene expression profiles and identify candidate genes related to disease resistance for further study. The comparison of the transcriptomes between the two genotypes showed that there were 475 highly expressed genes. Although we do not know if these genes are related to the disease resistance, we examined the expression of 21 potential differentiated genes through RT-PCR. Of them, 16 had different expressions with 7 genes had larger than 2 fold difference between these two genotyps. The data set generated in this study provides preliminary evidence for some candidate genes that are related to disease resistance in genus Lagerstroemia, and will help discover new genes for expediting crape myrtle disease breeding.