Identification of mycoparasitism-related genes in Clonostachys rosea 67-1 active against Sclerotinia sclerotiorum

Abstract

Clonostachys rosea is a mycoparasite that has shown great potential in controlling various plant fungal pathogens. In order to find mycoparasitism-related genes in C. rosea, the transcriptome of the efficient isolate 67-1 in association with sclerotia of Sclerotinia sclerotiorum was sequenced and analysed. The results identified 26,351 unigenes with a mean length of 1,102 nucleotides, among which 18,525 were annotated in one or more databases of NR, KEGG, Swiss-Prot, GO and COG. Differentially expressed genes at 8 h, 24 h and 48 h after sclerotial induction were analysed, and 6,890 unigenes were upregulated compared with the control without sclerotia. 713, 1,008 and 1,929 genes were specifically upregulated expressed, while 1,646, 283 and 529 genes were specifically downregulated, respectively. Gene ontology terms analysis indicated that these genes were mainly involved in metabolism of biological process, catalysis of molecular function and cellular component. The expression levels of 12 genes that were upregulated after encountering with S. sclerotiorum were monitored using real-time PCR. The results indicated that the quantitative detection was consistent with the transcriptome analysis. The study provides transcriptional gene expression information on C. rosea parasitizing S. sclerotiorum and forms the basis for further investigation of mycoparasitism-related genes of C. rosea.

Transformation of the endochitinase gene Chi67-1 in Clonostachys rosea 67-1 increases its biocontrol activity against Sclerotinia sclerotiorum

“…In a previous study, the endochitinase-encoding gene Chi67 - 1 was found to be significantly upregulated in C. rosea 67-1 parasitizing S. sclerotiorum , compared with expression in 67-1 not exposed to S. sclerotiorum (Sun et al 2015b). Therefore, we decided to attempt to genetically engineer a highly efficient biocontrol strain by overexpressing this gene.…”

“…Transcriptome sequencing and analysis of 67-1 parasitizing S. sclerotiorum sclerotia revealed a remarkable up-regulation of Chi67 - 1 , which encodes a 37 kDa endochitinase. The presence of this gene suggested that Chi67 - 1 was correlated with mycoparasitism of C. rosea (Sun et al 2015b). Therefore, in the present study, we investigated the role of this chitinase in mycoparasitism of C. rosea against S. sclerotiorum , and assessed the efficiency of 67-1 transformants overexpressing Chi67 - 1 against Sclerotinia rot of soybean, with the intention of improving the biocontrol of C. rosea .…”

The mycoparasitic fungus Clonostachys rosea responds with both common and specific gene expression during interspecific interactions with fungal prey

“…MFS transporter genes induced during interactions with B. cinerea and F. graminearum almost exclusively belonged to these expanded MFS families, indicating that efflux-mediated protection against exogenous or endogenous secondary metabolites and nutrient uptake are important components of the mycoparasitic attack in C. rosea. MFS transporters were reported to be induced in several other mycoparasitic species, including the closely related C. chloroleuca (Moreira, Abreu, Carvalho, Schroers, & Pfenning, 2016;Sun, Sun, & Li, 2015), Trichoderma spp. (Atanasova, Le Crom et al, 2013;Seidl et al, 2009;Steindorff et al, 2014), Tolypocladium ophioglossoides (Quandt, Di, Elser, Jaiswal, & Spatafora, 2016), Escovopsis weberi (de Man et al, 2016), Pythium oligandrum (Horner, Grenville-Briggs, & Van West, 2012) and Ampelomyces quisqualis (Siozios et al, 2015), but without proper identification of family classification it is difficult to speculate about their exact biological role in these species.…”

Determination of antagonistic effect of bio-agents against cereal damping-off caused by Fusarium graminearum in wheat

“…reduced the colonization of Fusarium species in wheat and maize plants (Luongo et al 2005 andWoo et al 2006). When taking into account that G. roseum had biosynthetic gene clusters to encode a large number of enzyme complexes and secondary metabolites, reported by Karlsson et al (2015) and Sun et al (2015), it was suggested that the main reason of antagonistic activity was related to the production of antifungal substances such as enzymes and secondary metabolites. In this manner, as a result of the interaction among them, G. roseum might damage to the cell structure along with hyphal penetration and promote disruption of pathogen cell.…”