Brachypodium as an emerging model for cereal–pathogen interactions

Abstract

Background Cereal diseases cause tens of billions of dollars of losses annually and have devastating humanitarian consequences in the developing world. Increased understanding of the molecular basis of cereal host-pathogen interactions should facilitate development of novel resistance strategies. However, achieving this in most cereals can be challenging due to large and complex genomes, long generation times and large plant size, as well as quarantine and intellectual property issues that may constrain the development and use of community resources. Brachypodium distachyon (brachypodium) with its small, diploid and sequenced genome, short generation time, high transformability and rapidly expanding community resources is emerging as a tractable cereal model.Scope Recent research reviewed here has demonstrated that brachypodium is either susceptible or partially susceptible to many of the major cereal pathogens. Thus, the study of brachypodium-pathogen interactions appears to hold great potential to improve understanding of cereal disease resistance, and to guide approaches to enhance this resistance. This paper reviews brachypodium experimental pathosystems for the study of fungal, bacterial and viral cereal pathogens; the current status of the use of brachypodium for functional analysis of cereal disease resistance; and comparative genomic approaches undertaken using brachypodium to assist characterization of cereal resistance genes. Additionally, it explores future prospects for brachypodium as a model to study cereal-pathogen interactions.Conclusions The study of brachypodium-pathogen interactions appears to be a productive strategy for understanding mechanisms of disease resistance in cereal species. Knowledge obtained from this model interaction has strong potential to be exploited for crop improvement.

Transcriptomics of cereal–Fusarium graminearum interactions: what we have learned so far

“…For this reason, in the past, the interaction between F. graminearum and the model dicot host Arabidopsis has been used to understand host resistance to F. graminearum (Brewer and Hammond-Kosack, 2015). The genetic and genomic resources available in the model monocot plant Brachypodium distachyon, which is known to be susceptible to many cereal pathogens, including F. graminearum (Fitzgerald et al, 2015a;Pasquet et al, 2014Pasquet et al, , 2016Peraldi et al, 2011), can also be exploited to overcome potential difficulties encountered as a result of the genetic complexity of cereal genomes, and to identify host genes regulating disease/toxin resistance or susceptibility. This knowledge can then be applied to cereal crops (Fitzgerald et al, 2015a;Schweiger et al, 2013b).…”

A Brachypodium UDP-Glycosyltransferase Confers Root Tolerance to Deoxynivalenol and Resistance to Fusarium Infection

“…B. distachyon has been shown to be a host species for many cereal pathogens (Peraldi et al, 2011(Peraldi et al, , 2014Mandadi and Scholthof, 2012;Falter and Voigt, 2014;Sandoya and de Oliveira Buanafina, 2014;Fitzgerald et al, 2015). In particular, it has been shown to exhibit typical FHB symptoms following infection by F. graminearum and to accumulate DON in infected spikes (Peraldi et al, 2011;Pasquet et al, 2014), demonstrating the potential of this model plant species to conduct functional genomics of FHB resistance.…”

Active Sites of Reduced Epidermal Fluorescence1 (REF1) Isoforms Contain Amino Acid Substitutions That Are Different between Monocots and Dicots

“…Brachypodium distachyon is a monocotyledon species that is closely related to crop plants such as, rice ( Oryza sativa ), wheat ( Triticum aestivum ), barley ( Hordeum vulgare ), rye ( Secale cereale ), and oats ( Avena sativa ) [47–52]. We have identified a total of nineteen ALDH genes in the B .…”