Location: Corn Insects and Crop Genetics Research
2022 Annual Report
Accomplishments
1. Genome-wide analysis of protein-protein interactions that control disease resistance in barley. To prevent economic loss due to disease, plant breeders incorporate resistance genes into varieties that are grown for food, feed, fuel and fiber. One of these resistance genes provides instructions for assembly of the barley mildew locus a (MLA) immune receptor, an ancestral cereal protein that confers recognition to powdery mildew, stem- and stripe rust. To function properly, these immune receptors must interact with other helper proteins during the different stages of fungal infection and plant defense. As recently published as the cover article in GENETICS, USDA-ARS scientists in Ames, Iowa, in collaboration with Iowa State University used custom Big Data methods to identify over 66,000 protein-protein interactions and model cellular response to powdery mildew infection. In particular, fifteen new MLA-interacting proteins were identified, predicted to localize to five diverse cellular locations over the course of infection. These results anchor new disease-resistance interactions within the cell during MLA-mediated immune response and will enable future work to understand key components of disease defense. This will promote new investigations from lab to fields, critical to breeders and growers that use disease resistance to produce better crops. This work was funded by the USDA-ARS, the USDA-National Institute of Food and Agriculture, the National Science Foundation, and Fulbright - Minciencias & Schlumberger Faculty for the Future fellowships.
Review Publications
Weldekidan, T., Manching, H., Choquette, N., de Leon, N., Flint-Garcia, S.A., Holland, J.B., Lauter, N.C., Murray, S.C., Xu, W., Goodman, M., Wisser, R.J. 2022. Registration of tropical populations of maize selected in parallel for early flowering time across the United States. Journal of Plant Registrations. 16(1):100-108. https://doi.org/10.1002/plr2.20181.
Wlezien, E.B., Peters, N.T., Wise, R., Boury, N. 2022. Role of crop genetic diversity on pathogen impact: The tale of two pathogens. CourseSource. https://doi.org/10.24918/cs.2022.14.
Velasquez-Zapata, V., Elmore, J., Fuerst, G.S., Wise, R.P. 2022. An interolog-based barley interactome as an integration framework for immune signaling. Genetics. 221(2). Article iyac056. https://doi.org/10.1093/genetics/iyac056.
Chapman, A.V., Elmore, J., McReynolds, M., Walley, J., Wise, R.P. 2021. SGT1-specific domain mutations impair interactions with the barley MLA6 immune receptor in association with loss of NLR protein. Molecular Plant-Microbe Interactions. 35(3):274-289. https://doi.org/10.1094/MPMI-08-21-0217-R.
