As part of a trend towards diversifying cultivated areas, varietal mixtures are regaining attention to manage diseases. Besides the epidemiological effects of varietal mixtures on pathogen propagation, little is known about the effect of intra-specific plant-plant interactions and their impact on plant response to disease. Genotypes of rice or durum wheat were grown with different conspecific neighbours and manually inoculated under conditions preventing pathogen propagation. We measured their disease susceptibility and the expression of basal immunity genes as part of the response to intra-specific neighbours. The results show for both rice and wheat that susceptibility to pathogens and immunity is modified in many instances by the presence of intra-specific neighbours. . This phenomenon, that we termed ‘Neighbour-Modulated Susceptibility’ (NMS), could be caused by the production of belowground signals and does not require the neighbours to be infected. Our study calls for a revisiting of the mechanisms reducing disease in varietal mixtures in the field.
Since rice (Oryza sativa) is an important crop and the most advanced model for monocotyledonous species, acceding to its physiological status is important for many fundamental and applied purposes. Although this physiological status can be obtained by measuring the transcriptional regulation of marker genes, the tools to perform such analysis are often too expensive, non flexible or time consuming. Here we manually selected 96 genes considered as biomarkers of important processes taking place in rice leaves based on literature analysis. We monitored their transcriptional regulation under several treatments (disease, phytohormone inoculation, abiotic stress...) using Fluidigm method that allows to perform ~10 000 RT-QPCR reactions in one single run. This technique allowed us to verify a large part of known regulations but also to identify new, unsuspected regulations. Together, our set of genes, coupled to our data analysis protocol with Fluidigm brings a new opportunity to have a fast and reasonably cheap access to the physiological status of rice leaves in a high number of samples.
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