Promoter mutations of an essential gene for pollen development result in disease resistance in rice

Zhaohui Chu; Meng Yuan; Jialing Yao; Xiaojia Ge; Bin Yuan; Caiguo Xu; Xianghua Li; Binying Fu; Zhikang Li; Jeffrey L. Bennetzen; Qifa Zhang; Shiping Wang

doi:10.1101/gad.1416306

Promoter mutations of an essential gene for pollen development result in disease resistance in rice

xa13

¹ National Key Laboratory of Crop Genetic Improvement, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan 430070, China;
² Plant Breeding, Genetics and Biotechnology Division, International Rice Research Institute, 1099 Manila, The Philippines;
³ Department of Genetics, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia 30602, USA

Abstract

Disease resistance and sexual reproductive development are generally considered as separate biological processes, regulated by different sets of genes. Here we show that xa13, a recessive allele conferring disease resistance against bacterial blight, one of the most devastating rice diseases worldwide, plays a key role in both disease resistance and pollen development. The dominant allele, Xa13, is required for both bacterial growth and pollen development. Promoter mutations in Xa13 cause down-regulation of expression during host–pathogen interaction, resulting in the fully recessive xa13 that confers race-specific resistance. The recessive xa13 allele represents a new type of plant disease resistance.

Keywords

Footnotes

⁴
↵4 Present address: Institute of Crop Sciences, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing 100081, China.
⁵
↵5 Corresponding author.

↵5 E-MAIL swang{at}mail.hzau.edu.cn; FAX 86-27-87287092.
Supplemental material is available at http://www.genesdev.org.
Article published online ahead of print. Article and publication date are at http://www.genesdev.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gad.1416306
- Received January 31, 2006.
- Accepted March 8, 2006.