| Plant resistance to disease and its associated molecule mechanism has been a hotspot and focus of plant physiology, pathology, biochemistry and molecular biology. Recently with the rapid advancement in these branches, their theories and technology gradually penetrate the study of the molecule mechanism of disease-resistance. Much investigations showed that some small molecules like salicylicacid (SA) and peroxide (H2O2) are involved in the course of destroying foreign pathogens. These small molecules are deemed to participate in the communication conduction of plant depollution as signal molecules and that are capable of instigating a defense response in the infested plants. DNA methylation is an important epigenetic marker in many eukaryotes including plants, which plays important roles, among others, in response to stress such as pathogen attack. Therefore, it will be interesting to determine whether intrinsic DNA methylation patterns may change under pathogen infestation in plants.Because SA and H2O2 treatments have been shown to induce stress-responses in plants, which are similar to those instigated by pathogen attach, these small molecules provide good mimics of pathogen attack. The present study was aimed to address the question whether treatments by SA and H2O2 may cause changes in DNA methylation patterns. For this purpose, I used the rice cultivar Matsumae and three introgression lines (RZ35, RZ1 and RZ2) derived from this rice cultivar to investigate the treatments by various concentrations of SA and H2O2. Changes in DNA methylation patterns were detected by two methods, i.e., methylation-sensitive-Southern bloting and methylation-sensitive amplified polymorphism (MSAP). An interesting observation from this study is that the different rice lines respond differently to the treatments, suggesting that epigenetic remodelling in DNA methylation patterns is involved in response to SA and H2O2 treatments, and that this involvement is genotype-dependent in rice. |
PDF Full Text Request