GSE113773
Differential gene expression and physiological changes during acute or persistent plant virus interactions may contribute to viral symptom differences (RNA-Seq)
Viruses have different strategy to infect their hosts. Acute type infection is fast resulting in severe symptoms or in the death of the plant, while in persistent type of interaction the virus can survive within its host for a long period of time with mild symptoms. During our studies we investigated gene expression changes of virus infected Nicotiana benthamiana and Solanum lycopersicum after systemic spread of the virus by two different methods: microarray hybridization and RNA sequencing. Using these high throughput techniques we could easily differentiate between acute and persistent type of infection and validate key expression changes by Northern blot hybridization. We also demonstrated that in persistent infection not only drastic downregulation of important housekeeping genes, but induction of stress genes are missing, making possible for the virus to survive in its host for a long period of time. Symptoms of acute and persistent type virus infection differ markedly and according to our results the type of infection can be distinguished even at an early point by characterizing the photosynthetic activity of virus infected plants. Overall design: RNA-Seq was made from PVX, TMV infected and mock inoculated leafs in 3 biological replicates and 1 technical repeat