Implication of a pepper h-type thioredoxin in type I- and II-nonhost resistance to Xanthomonas axonopodis

Abstract

Thioredoxins (TRXs) are distributed ubiquitously in prokaryotic and eukaryotic organisms. Plants have the most complex forms of TRXs. The functional roles of such TRXs have been studied in abiotic stress but their roles in plant defense responses against biotic stresses have been less well studied. Here, we identified an h-type TRX gene from pepper, CaTRXh1, and characterized its possible effect on Type II nonhost resistance, which entails localized programmed cell death in response to nonhost pathogens. Peptide sequences of CaTRXh1 showed a high degree of similarity with TRXhs from tobacco and Arabidopsis thaliana. Southern blot analyses revealed that CaTRXh1 was present as a single copy in the pepper genome. Intriguingly, leaf infiltration by Xanthomonas axonopodis pv. glycines 8ra, eliciting a visible type II nonhost hypersensitive response (HR), and its type III secretion-system null mutant 8.13, eliciting a type I nonhost non-HR, both induced CaTRXh1 at a level similar to that of pathogenesis-related protein 4, an HR marker gene in pepper. More surprisingly, expression of CaTRXh1 was significantly increased when X. axonopodis pv. vesicatoria race 3 infiltrated the leaf of a pepper cultivar containing a resistance gene, but not with infiltration of a susceptible pepper cultivar. Taken together, our study suggests that the expression of CaTRXh1 has a critical role in HR-mediated active defense responses in pepper.