Skip to main content
ISMPMI Congress 2025 Main banner
Icon Legend
This session is not in your schedule.
This session is in your schedule. Click again to remove it.

Poster

Session: Session 2 Presenting Authors at Posters (Evens)

P-030 - Elucidating conserved gene regulatory networks controlling lettuce response to Botrytis cinerea

Thursday, July 17, 2025
13:30 - 15:15  
Location: Confex Hall 3
Crop resistance genetics and genomics
Botrytis cinerea is a destructive necrotrophic fungal pathogen affecting hundreds of crop species including lettuce, UK production of which in 2022 was valued at £228 million. Plant defence towards such generalist necrotrophs is not conferred by one resistance gene but is a quantitative trait governed by many small-medium effect genes. Upon infection, lettuce undergoes massive transcriptional reprogramming, coordinated by transcription factors (TFs). Previously, we used a gene regulatory network model to identify TFs acting as key positive and negative regulators of immunity to B. cinerea in lettuce and Arabidopsis. From this, NAC53 was identified as a negative regulator of defence, but its downstream target genes and how it impacts the defence response is not yet clear. Arabidopsis nac53 knockout lines show increased resistance to B. cinerea; constitutive expression of the lettuce NAC53 orthologue complements the nac53 mutant, restoring B. cinerea susceptibility, suggesting a conserved role between species. To investigate the role of NAC53 as a conserved regulator of immunity, we use RNA-seq to profile the transcriptomes of Col-0, nac53 lines and two nac53 lines expressing LsNAC53, to identify downstream targets of NAC53. We screen the upstream promoter regions of putative targets for NAC53 binding sites to identify those likely to be direct targets. Preliminary results identify several potential target genes which have been shown to have roles during B. cinerea infection.