Analysis of early events in the Arabidopsis-Verticillium interaction
Final Report Abstract
The data reported show a wide spread response in different parts of the metabolism. The most affected pathways are linked to general stress response, to cell wall metabolism and to defense mechanisms. There is no clue for a specific set of proteins expressed after infection. Interestingly also the shoot responded although this plant part was never in contact with the conidia. We also demonstrated that the fungus did not grow significantly within 2 d after first contact. That suggests a signal being transported from the infected roots to the shoot. We speculate on NO being this signal. If these although not complete results were compared to the data for gene expression it becomes obvious, that the response on the expression level includes more genes than finally found at the proteomic level. The regulation of the translation upstream gene expression needs to be taken into account with respect to plant responses on infection.
