GSE53825
Infection of apple by Apple stem grooving virus leads to extensive alterations in gene expression patterns but no disease symptoms
To understand the molecular basis of viral diseases, transcriptome profiling has been widely used to correlate host gene expression change patterns with disease symptoms during viral infection in many plant hosts. We used infection of apple by Apple stem grooving virus (ASGV), which produces no disease symptoms, to assess the significance of host gene expression changes in disease development. We specifically asked the question whether such asymptomatic infection is attributed to limited changes in host gene expression. Using RNA-seq, we identified a total of 184 up-regulated and 136 down-regulated genes in apple shoot cultures permanently infected by ASGV in comparison with virus-free shoots cultures. As in most plant hosts showing disease symptoms during viral infection, these differentially expressed genes encode known or putative proteins involved in cell cycle, cell wall biogenesis, response to biotic and abiotic stress, development and fruit ripening, phytohormone function, metabolism, signal transduction, transcription regulation, translation, transport, and photosynthesis. Our data suggest that current approaches to correlate host gene expression changes under viral infection conditions to specific infection processes or disease symptom development, based on the interpretation of individual gene functions, have severe limitations. Integrative approaches that can take into account plant development stages, gene threshold levels as well as compensatory, synergistic and antagonistic effects may be necessary to develop a sound systems understanding of the biological significance of host gene expression changes during infection. Overall design: Compare the transcript profiling of ASGV-infected asymptomatic apple planlets (AP-Vinfect) and virus-free apple plantlets (AP-Vfree) by deep sequencing using Illumina RNA-Seq to check whether lots of genes were modulated by ASGV infection.