Alternative polyadenylation profiles of susceptible and resistant rice (Oryza sativa L.) in response to bacterial leaf blight using RNA-seq

Shaochun Liu, Shuqi Luo, Dewei Yang, Junying Huang, Xinlei Jiang, Shangwei Yu, Junru Fu, Dahu Zhou, Xiaorong Chen, Haohua He, Haihui Fu

BMC Plant Biol.; 2024 Feb 28; 24(1):145. doi: 10.1186/s12870-024-04839-6.

Background: Alternative polyadenylation (APA) is an important pattern of post-transcriptional regulation of genes widely existing in eukaryotes, involving plant physiological and pathological processes. However, there is a dearth of studies investigating the role of APA profile in rice leaf blight.

Results: In this study, we compared the APA profile of leaf blight-susceptible varieties (CT 9737-613P-M) and resistant varieties (NSIC RC154) following bacterial blight infection. Through gene enrichment analysis, we found that the genes of two varieties typically exhibited distal poly(A) (PA) sites that play different roles in two kinds of rice, indicating differential APA regulatory mechanisms. In this process, many disease-resistance genes displayed multiple transcripts via APA. Moreover, we also found five polyadenylation factors of similar expression patterns of rice, highlighting the critical roles of these five factors in rice response to leaf blight about PA locus diversity.

Conclusion: Notably, the present study provides the first dynamic changes of APA in rice in early response to biotic stresses and proposes a possible functional conjecture of APA in plant immune response, which lays the theoretical foundation for in-depth determination of the role of APA events in plant stress response and other life processes.

See https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38413866/

Figure 1: Profiles of the poly(A)(PA) sites of disease resistance and susceptibility under leaf blight stress conditions. APA: alternative polyadenylation (A) Flow chart of data analysis in this paper. R: resistant rice, S: susceptible rice. B Genes and poly(A) sites (per gene) identified in rice. C APA profile was calculated using the relative expression of distal PA site isoforms (RUD). D RUD pattern of susceptible rice. E RUD pattern of resistant rice