Botrytis cinerea on Riesling grapesWIKIMEDIA, TOM MAACKStrike, counter-strike, and so on, ad infinitum. The relationship between pathogens and their hosts is a never-ending, continuously evolving battle. And scientists have now discovered that one plant pathogen even hijacks its host’s defense system for its own use. According to a report published online today (October 3) in Science, the gray mold fungus, Botrytis cinerea, deploys small, non-coding RNAs (sRNAs) that subvert the plant’s silencing machinery, forcing it to suppress the expression of host immune system genes.
“We know we’re always going to see defense and counter-defense,” said David Baulcombe, a professor of plant sciences at Cambridge University, who was not involved in the work. “But what is novel about this one is that . . . the counter-defense system is firstly an RNA molecule, which is new, and secondly . . . it moves from a fungal to a plant cell and that, too, is quite novel.”
Hailing Jin, a professor of plant pathology and microbiology at the University of California, Riverside, who led the new study, was intrigued to discover that a fungus uses RNAs to attack plants. She had been searching for sRNAs induced upon infection, but had assumed that they would be produced by the plants themselves. After ...
