GSE111238
The disease resistance protein SNC1 represses the biogenesis of microRNAs and phased siRNAs [mRNA]
Plants evolved an array of disease resistance genes (R genes) to fight pathogens. In the absence of pathogen infection, NBS-LRR genes, which comprise a major subfamily of R genes, are suppressed by a small RNA cascade involving microRNAs (miRNAs) that trigger the biogenesis of phased siRNAs (phasiRNAs) from R gene transcripts. However, whether or how R genes influence small RNA biogenesis is unknown. In this study, we isolated a mutant with global defects in the biogenesis of miRNAs and phasiRNAs in Arabidopsis thaliana and traced the defects to the over accumulation and nuclear localization of an R protein SNC1. We showed that nuclear SNC1 represses the transcription of miRNA and phasiRNA loci, probably through the transcriptional corepressor TPR1. Intriguingly, nuclear SNC1 reduces the accumulation of phasiRNAs from three source R genes and concomitantly, the expression of a majority of the ~170 R genes was up-regulated. Taken together, this study reveals a new R gene-miRNA-phasiRNA regulatory module that regulates plants' growth-defense trade-off. Overall design: Total RNAs extracted from 15-day-old seedlings of wild type and mutants were sent to Novogene, China, for mRNA-seq library construction and the libraries were sequenced on an Illumina Hiseq X10 platform to generate single-end reads of 150 bp in length.