Functional Analysis Of A Nodulin-like Gene GhMtN21-31 In Cotton Resistance Against Verticillium Wilt

Cotton is an important economic crop.Verticillium Wilt will cause serious cotton yield reduction,and the fiber quality will decline,causing serious economic losses.In China,Verticillium Wilt is mainly caused by Verticillium Wilt Verticillium Wilt is a soil-borne fungus that can survive in the soil for 10-15 years in the form of microsclerotia.Commonly used control methods such as spraying fungicides or other chemical reagents,crop rotation and conventional breeding of resistant varieties have no obvious effect on reducing the harm of Verticillium Wilt,which is a major obstacle to disease control.Therefore,it is an effective method to accelerate the breeding of cotton resistant varieties to discover the genes for resistance to Verticillium Wilt and study their mechanism of action in molecular breeding.Virus-induced gene silencing technology is a method that can quickly and high-throughput explore gene functions.Therefore,it may play an important role on screening cotton functional genes,quickly discovering cotton resistance genes,studying disease resistance mechanisms,and producing resistant varieties.This study explored the function of cotton genes through virus-induced gene silencing technology,screened functional genes related to cotton Verticillium Wilt resistance,and devoted to the study of the mechanism of disease resistance,and finally got a gene related to cotton resistance GhMtN21-31,which belong to Nodulation gene family and encode amino acid/auxin transporter protein.After silencing the gene,the identification of cotton’s disease resistance showed that the plants with silenced gene GhMtN21-31 had increased resistance to Verticillium Wilt After inoculation with Verticillium Wilt,the expression level of the salicylic acid marker gene in cotton with the silent gene GhMtN21-31 was up-regulated,and the salicylic acid content increased.Compared with the control group,the salicylic acid content was extremely significant.Transcriptome sequencing was performed on the silent cotton and its control group after receiving disease.The results showed that the signal pathways involved in the defense response of plant pathogens such as plant-pathogen interaction pathway,MAPK signaling pathway,and phosphatidylinositol signaling system were activated..In these pathways,the gene expression levels of some protein family members related to pathogen resistance have increased significantly.In summary,we believe that the gene GhMtN21-31 screened in this study has a negative regulatory effect on cotton Verticillium wilt resistance,and may be involved in the regulation through the salicylic acid signal transduction pathway.The results of this study are the new results of the research on the resistance of cotton to Verticillium wilt,and provide new clues for the creation of new resistant cotton varieties.