Browsing by Author "Sunita Pal"

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MicroRNAs associated with spot blotch in bread wheat (Triticum aestivum)
(Academic Press, 2025) Neeraj Kumar Vasistha; Sandeep K. Sharma; Vinod Kumar Mishra; Tinku Gautam; Gautam M. Saripalli; Sunita Pal; Pushpendra Kumar Gupta
Spot blotch, caused by the fungal pathogen Bipolaris sorokiniana, poses a significant threat to wheat production worldwide, particularly in warm and humid regions. Recent advances in molecular biology have highlighted the pivotal role of microRNAs (miRNAs) in regulating plant defense responses against various biotic stresses, including fungal infections. In the present study, miRNAs in wheat were examined during spot blotch infection. High-throughput sequencing and bioinformatics analysis were employed to identify differentially expressed miRNAs in resistant and susceptible wheat genotypes (YS#54 and YS#83) following B. sorokiniana inoculation. As many as 572 conserved and 632 additional miRNAs (potentially novel) were identified; some of them were upregulated and others downregulated, suggesting their involvement in defense signaling pathways, including those targeting transcription factors and resistance-related genes. Targets for miRNAs were also identified for 467 miRNAs, which included 7937 transcripts; the expression profiles of transcripts generally had a negative correlation with miRNA expression. The results of the present study provide new insights into the miRNA-mediated regulatory networks in wheat-pathogen interactions and lay the groundwork for the development of miRNA-based markers or strategies for enhancing resistance to spot blotch disease. © 2025 Elsevier Ltd
Transcriptome analysis for the identification of spot blotch responsive genes and miRNAs in wheat
(Academic Press, 2025) Neeraj Kumar Vasistha; Archita Tandon; Sunita Pal; Sandeep K. Sharma; Vinod Kumar Mishra; Pushpendra Kumar Gupta
Spot blotch caused by Bipolaris sorokiniana is one of the most devastating foliar diseases of wheat particularly in South Asian countries including India, Nepal, Bangladesh etc. In the present study, using whole genome transcriptome sequencing data from two contrasting genotypes for spot blotch disease (one resistant and the other susceptible), at three time points after inoculation, we identified a large number of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) and many microRNAs (miRNAs) with their target genes (in silico). The mean number of reads in six libraries were 39.8 millions with a range of 32.1–44.9 million reads per library. The reads from resistant and susceptible genotypes were aligned. The aligned reads had a mean of 32.4 million with a range of 25.0–37.1 million reads. The raw data were deposited into the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) database under the SRA accession number PRJNA1182498. The DEGs included 5294 upregulated and 4383 downregulated genes. Functional annotation and enrichment analysis showed that the main pathways enriched for the DEGs included photosynthesis-antenna proteins, MAPK signaling pathways, plant-pathogen interactions, circadian rhythm-plant, etc. These DEGs mainly encoded proteins with leucine rich repeat (LRR) domain, F-box-like domain, non-specific serine/threonine-protein kinases (S/TPK), wall-associated receptor kinases (WAKs), etc. Many DEGs also belonged to the following families of transcription factors (TFs): ERF, NAC, WRKY, GRAS, MYB etc. Few DEGs were also associated with pathogenesis related (PR) proteins including PR 1.1, PR 1.2, PR 1.17 and PR 1.19. The results of the present study may be utilized by plant breeders, geneticists and bioinformatician for further research. © 2024 Elsevier Ltd