Functional cooperation between PR3 and TUB in potato plants infected with late blight

Antonious Al-Daoude, Amina Shoaib and Mohammed Jawhar

Volume 29, Issue 4;
Pages: 275-279; 2023
ISSN: 2069-0053 (print), Agroprint;
ISSN (online): 2068-9551

Late blight (LB), caused by the fungus Phytophthora infestans is an economical disease of potato worldwide. Little is known about how defense-related genes cooperate to resist potato LB development. In the current work, expression of two genes PR3 and TUB were examined in resistant and susceptible potato cultivars at early stages of LB infection using quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR). The results showed significant variance in the expression patterns of the both genes between resistant and susceptible potato - P. infestans interactions as compared to the non-inoculated controls.  It is also notable that PR3 and TUB genes were highly expressed in the resistant cultivar as compared to a susceptible one. qPCR analysis revealed strong expression of genes in resistant cultivar when compared to susceptible with expression for PR3 (6.1 and 2.5-fold) and TUB (1.8 and 1.3-fold) respectively, at 72 hours post inoculation. The obtained results suggest that PR3 and TUB genes, positively regulate P. infestans —resistance in potato plants during disease progress, which can provide testable hypotheses that will need direct future tests to determine how these changes may be specified in the potato plant cytoskeleton rearrangement during the biotrophic stage.