A barley cultivation-associated polymorphism conveys resistance to powdery mildew

Pietro Piffanelli, Luke Ramsay, Robbie Waugh, Abdellah Benabdelmouna, Angélique D'Hont, Karin Hollricher, Jørgen Helms Jørgensen, Paul Schulze-Lefert () and Ralph Panstruga
Additional contact information
Pietro Piffanelli: The Sainsbury Laboratory, John Innes Centre, Colney Lane
Luke Ramsay: Genomics Unit, Scottish Crop Research Institute, Invergowrie
Robbie Waugh: Genomics Unit, Scottish Crop Research Institute, Invergowrie
Abdellah Benabdelmouna: CIRAD
Angélique D'Hont: CIRAD
Karin Hollricher: Max-Planck-Institut für Züchtungsforschung
Jørgen Helms Jørgensen: Risø National Laboratory, Plant (formerly: Agricultural) Research Department
Paul Schulze-Lefert: Max-Planck-Institut für Züchtungsforschung
Ralph Panstruga: Max-Planck-Institut für Züchtungsforschung

Nature, 2004, vol. 430, issue 7002, 887-891

Abstract: Abstract Barley (Hordeum vulgare) has played a pivotal role in Old World agriculture since its domestication about 10,000 yr ago1. Barley plants carrying loss-of-function alleles (mlo) of the Mlo locus are resistant against all known isolates of the widespread powdery mildew fungus2. The sole mlo resistance allele recovered so far from a natural habitat, mlo-11, was originally retrieved from Ethiopian landraces and nowadays controls mildew resistance in the majority of cultivated European spring barley elite varieties2. Here we use haplotype analysis to show that the mlo-11 allele probably arose once after barley domestication. Resistance in mlo-11 plants is linked to a complex tandem repeat array inserted upstream of the wild-type gene. The repeat units consist of a truncated Mlo gene comprising 3.5 kilobases (kb) of 5′-regulatory sequence plus 1.1 kb of coding sequence. These generate aberrant transcripts that impair the accumulation of both Mlo wild-type transcript and protein. We exploited the meiotic instability of mlo-11 resistance and recovered susceptible revertants in which restoration of Mlo function was accompanied by excision of the repeat array. We infer cis-dependent perturbation of transcription machinery assembly by transcriptional interference in mlo-11 plants as a likely mechanism leading to disease resistance.

Date: 2004
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature02781 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:430:y:2004:i:7002:d:10.1038_nature02781

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/nature02781

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().