Tomato Whole Genome Transcriptional Response to Tetranychus urticae Identifies Divergence of Spider Mite-Induced Responses Between Tomato and Arabidopsis

Abstract

The two-spotted spider mite Tetranychus urticae is one of the most significant mite pests in agriculture, feeding on more than 1,100 plant hosts, including model plants Arabidopsis thaliana and tomato, Solanum lycopersicum. Here, we describe timecourse tomato transcriptional responses to spider mite feeding and compare them with Arabidopsis in order to determine conserved and divergent defense responses to this pest. To refine the involvement of jasmonic acid (JA) in mite-induced responses and to improve tomato Gene Ontology annotations, we analyzed transcriptional changes in the tomato JA-signaling mutant defenseless1 (def-1) upon JA treatment and spider mite herbivory. Overlay of differentially expressed genes (DEG) identified in def-1 onto those from the timecourse experiment established that JA controls expression of the majority of genes differentially regulated by herbivory. Comparison of defense responses between tomato and Arabidopsis highlighted 96 orthologous genes (of 2,133 DEG) that were recruited for defense against spider mites in both species. These genes, involved in biosynthesis of JA, phenylpropanoids, flavonoids, and terpenoids, represent the conserved core of induced defenses. The remaining tomato DEG support the establishment of tomato-specific defenses, indicating profound divergence of spider mite-induced responses between tomato and Arabidopsis.

Cross-talk between high light stress and plant defence to the two-spotted spider mite in Arabidopsis thaliana

“…Recently, several transcriptomic approaches allowed to establish molecular basis of its ability to adapt to different host plant species such as Arabidopsis, tomato and grapevine (Grbić et al 2011;Wybouw et al 2015;Díaz-Riquelme et al 2016;Rioja et al 2017). These thorough analyses often included monitoring of host plant transcriptional dynamics upon TSSM infestation and together with Arabidopsis and tomato focused research (Zhurov et al 2014;Martel et al 2015), gave an extensive overview on gene expression changes occurred starting from the early time points of infestation. However, there is a lack of data on how plants respond to TSSM in the presence of other stresses such as high light.…”

Drought-stressed tomato plants trigger bottom-up effects on key mite pests

“…The serine (PI-I, WIPI-II, JIP-21) aspartyl (CDI) and cysteine (CysPI) PI genes are induced by tetranychid mites in tomato but not by A. lycopersici (Li, et al, 2002;Kant et al, 2014;Glas, 2014;Glas et al, 2014;Alba et al 2015;Martel et al, 2015). Plant cysteine PIs are harmful for T. urticae (Santamaria et al, 2012(Santamaria et al, , 2015b been studied using some of these markers genes Alba et al, 2015).…”

“…Tomato inducible defenses include secondary metabolites and anti-nutritional proteins as direct defenses, and volatile-mediated indirect defenses (Stout et al, 1994;Kennedy, 2003;Kant et al, 2004;Martel et al, 2015). The induction of plant defenses has different steps that are followed successively to trigger the response.…”

“…urticae (Glas, 2014;Martel et al, 2015), and A. lycopersici (Glas, 2014), inducing both species the accumulation of OPDA, JA and JA-Ile (Glas, 2014;Glas et al, 2014;Alba et al, 2015).…”

“…In the case of tomato, different secondary metabolites (e.g., phenolics, flavonoids and terpenoids) are elicited in response to mite feeding, and there is some evidence that both JA and SA pathways are involved in orchestrating this response (Kant et al, 2004;Glas, 2014;Martel et al, 2015).…”