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Transcript profiling of chitosan-treated Arabidopsis seedlings

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Abstract

In nature, plants can recognize potential pathogens, thus activating intricate networks of defense signals and reactions. Inducible defense is often mediated by the detection of microbe or pathogen associated molecular pattern elicitors, such as flagellin and chitin. Chitosan, the deacetylated form of chitin, plays a role in inducing protection against pathogens in many plant species. We evaluated the ability of chitosan to confer resistance to Botrytis cinerea in Arabidopsis leaves. We subsequently treated Arabidopsis seedlings with chitosan and carried out a transcript profiling analysis using both ATH1 GeneChip microarrays and quantitative RT-PCR. The results showed that defense response genes, including camalexin biosynthesis genes, were up-regulated by chitosan, both in wild-type and in the chitin-insensitive cerk1 mutant, indicating that chitosan is perceived through a CERK1-independent pathway.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Dr. Simone Ferrari and Dr. Roberta Galletti (Università di Roma La Sapienza, Italy) for helpful suggestions and for kindly providing us with active oligogalacturonides and Botrytis cinerea inoculum, and Dr. Larisa Angela Swirsky Whitney for editing the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. PlantLab, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Piazza Martiri della Libertà 33, 56127, Pisa, Italy

    Giovanni Povero, Chiara Pucciariello, Antonietta Santaniello & Pierdomenico Perata

  2. Istituto di Biologia e Biotecnologia Agraria, National Research Council, Via Moruzzi 1, 56100, Pisa, Italy

    Elena Loreti

  3. Valagro, Zona Industriale, 66041, Atessa, Chieti, Italy

    Donata Di Tommaso, Gianluca Di Tommaso & Alberto Piaggesi

  4. Genopolis Consortium, Università di Milano Bicocca, Piazza della Scienza 2-4, 20126, Milan, Italy

    Dimos Kapetis & Francesca Zolezzi

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  1. Giovanni Povero
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  3. Chiara Pucciariello
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Correspondence to Pierdomenico Perata.

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Table S1.

List of primers used in this work (DOC 34 kb)

Table S2.

List of genes up and down-regulated by chitosan in the microarray experiment. The differentially expressed genes (DEG) were filtered by selecting genes showing a fold change (≥ 2 or ≤-2) (see materials and methods) (XLS 452 kb)

Table S3.

List of transcription factors up-regulated by chitosan. Genes induced by chitin (Libault et al. 2007) are also shown. The differentially expressed genes (DEG) were filtered by selecting genes showing a fold change ≥ 2 (DOC 137 kb)

Table S4.

Comparison of the effects of chitosan and B. cinerea infection at the gene level. Expression data relative to B. cinerea 48h treatment were obtained using the eFP Browser software (Winter et al., 2007; http://www.bar.utoronto.ca/efp/cgi-bin/efpWeb.cgi). Expression data of genes induced by chitosan (3h treatment) are averaged transcript level from two biological replicates (this work). The 100 genes most induced by chitosan were selected (XLS 72 kb)

Table S5.

Comparison between the chitosan dataset GSE17193 and the publicly available chitin dataset described by Wan et al. (2008) (GSM206278, GSM206277, GSM206279: controls; GSM206274, GSM206275, GSM206276: chitooctaose treatment) (XLS 1712 kb)

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Povero, G., Loreti, E., Pucciariello, C. et al. Transcript profiling of chitosan-treated Arabidopsis seedlings. J Plant Res 124, 619–629 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10265-010-0399-1

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