Abstract
Nucleotide-binding site (NBS) disease resistance genes play an important role in defending plants from a range of pathogens and insect pests. Consequently, NBS-encoding genes have been the focus of a number of recent studies in molecular disease resistance breeding programs. However, little is known about NBS-encoding genes in Lotus japonicus. In this study, a full set of disease resistance (R) candidate genes encoding NBS from the complete genome of L. japonicus was identified and characterized using structural diversity, chromosomal locations, conserved protein motifs, gene duplications, and phylogenetic relationships. Distinguished by N-terminal motifs and leucine-rich repeat motifs (LRRs), 92 regular NBS genes of 158 NBS-coding sequences were classified into seven types: CC-NBS-LRR, TIR-NBS-LRR, NBS-LRR, CC-NBS, TIR-NBS, NBS, and NBS-TIR. Phylogenetic reconstruction of NBS-coding sequences revealed many NBS gene lineages, dissimilar from results for Arabidopsis but similar to results from research on rice. Conserved motif structures were also analyzed to clarify their distribution in NBS-encoding gene sequences. Moreover, analysis of the physical locations and duplications of NBS genes showed that gene duplication events of disease resistance genes were lower in L. japonicus than in rice and Arabidopsis, which may contribute to the relatively fewer NBS genes in L. japonicus. Sixty-three NBS-encoding genes with clear conserved domain character were selected to check their gene expression levels by semi-quantitative RT-PCR. The results indicated that 53 of the genes were most likely to be acting as the active genes, and exogenous application of salicylic acid improved expression of most of the R genes.
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Acknowledgments
We wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on this manuscript. We also acknowledge Professor Beijiu Cheng for critical reading of the manuscript, and Dr Xiao Cheng and Dr Yexiong Qian for their assistance with computational analysis. The project was funded by the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (863 Program, Grant No. 2008AA10Z408).
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X. Li and Y. Cheng contributed equally to this work.
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Figure S1. Amino acid alignment of NBS domains of NBS protein in L. japonicus. The protein sequences were aligned using ClustalX (1.83) and displayed by DNAMAN software (PDF 90 kb)
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Li, X., Cheng, Y., Ma, W. et al. Identification and characterization of NBS-encoding disease resistance genes in Lotus japonicus . Plant Syst Evol 289, 101–110 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00606-010-0331-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00606-010-0331-0