Novel candidate genes for quantitative resistance to late blight in potato Teresa Mosquera-Vásquez1, 2, José M. Jiménez-Gómez2, Astrid Draffehn2, Christiane Gebhardt2 1
Universidad Nacional de Colombia,Facultad de Agronomía, Bogotá, Colombia; Institute for Plant Breeding Research, Cologne, Germany.
2
Max Planck
Presenting author: tmosquerav@unal.edu.co; Corresponding author: gebhardt@mpipz.mpg.de
Late blight continuous to be the most important disease of the potato crop and its chemical control generates high production costs and damage to the environment. The development of new potato cultivars with field resistance to Phytophthora infestans requires the search for variants of those genes that are involved in the quantitative defense response. Criteria for the selection of candidate genes for quantitative resistance to late blight were established and 36 novel candidate genes were selected from a comparative transcriptomics analysis using RNAseq. They are being validated by analyzing association with resistance to late blight in a diploid Solanum phureja population and in two tetraploid S. tuberosum breeding populations. Primers were designed on exon-sequences flanking candidate SNPs in the selected genes. The amplicons were sequenced and scored for SNPs. The SNPs were preliminary tested by ANOVA for their association with resistance to late blight in the three potato populations. SNPs in six candidate genes show promising associations. They are annotated as a 14kDa thylakoid membrane phosphoprotein, a pectinesterase, a thylakoid lumenal 15 kDa protein, a 10 kDa photosystem II polypeptide, a cytochrome P450 protein and a calmodulin. This suggests that among others, genes functional in the chloroplast in general and in photosynthesis in particular might be involved in quantitative resistance to late blight. This research was supported by contract RGE0069 to access genetic resources from Ministerio del Ambiente y Desarrollo in Colombia, by the German Ministry for Research and Education, the Max-Planck society, IDRC and CIDA.
Oral presentation Topic: Potato & Egg Plant or biotic interactions Key words: Quantitative resistance Late blight Candidate genes