Identification of lncRNAs transcriptionally active during tomato immune response

POMBO, MARINA ALEJANDRA; ROSLI, HERNÁN GUILLERMO; LAUFF, DIANA BEATRIZ

Congreso; II Reunión Argentina de Biología de ANRs no codificantes; 2018

Plants have evolved a two-layered immune response against pathogens. Pattern-triggered immunity (PTI) is activated as consequence of the perception of microbe-associated molecular patterns (MAMPs) through pattern recognition receptors (PRRs) and leads to cell wall reinforcement, reactive oxygen species (ROS) production, etc. Some pathogenic bacteria such as Pseudomonas syringae pv. tomato (Pst) are able to deliver using a type 3 secretion system, effector proteins into the plant cell cytoplasm. Effectors manipulate cell metabolism favoring bacterial proliferation. Resistant plants are able to detect the activity of effectors by means of resistance (R) proteins, leading to the activation of effector-triggered immunity (ETI) usually associated to a hypersensitive response (HR) that allows controlling bacterial population growth. Both PTI and ETI activation result in large transcriptomic changes that have been studied in the past years using RNA-seq. In this work we reanalyzed previously generated data from tomato leaves challenged with MAMPs and Pst mutants in order to identify novel transcripts that are putative long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs). Filtering these novel transcripts (22,595) by length >200 bp, open reading frame length