Arabidopsis mpk6-1 Mutants and Its Non-Host Resistance Against Magnaporthe Oryzae

Abstract

Rice is one of the most important grain with regard to human nutrition and caloric intake, providing more than one fifth of the calories consumed worldwide by humans. It is the most widely consumed staple food for a large part of the world’s human population, especially in Asia. It is an agricultural commodity with the third-highest worldwide production, after sugarcane and maize. A crop failure possess a real threat of starvation. Rice blast, caused by a fungus M. oryzae. It can affect all above ground parts of a rice plant: leaf, collar, node, neck, parts of panicle, and sometimes leaf sheath. Rice blast is one of the most devastating diseases of rice. A leaf blast infection can kill seedlings or plants up to the tillering stage. At later growth stages, a severe leaf blast infection reduces leaf area for grain fill thus reducing grain yield. Leaf blast can kill rice plants at seedling stage and cause yield losses in cases of severe infection. Arabidopsis is a model plant for studying NHR against several plant pathogens. Here, nonhost resistance in Arabidopsis is studied against rice blast pathogen M. oryzae. The infection in mpk6-1 mutants of Arabidopsis was higher in comparison with wild type Col-0. This was evident from confocal microscopy. Furthermore, on studying the expression of PR1, it can be concluded that the pathogen is hemibiotrophic as PR1 expression was absent.