Plant-Necrotroph Co-transcriptome Networks Illuminate a Metabolic Battlefield

A central goal of studying host-pathogen interaction research is to understand how the host and pathogen manipulate each other to promote their own fitness in a pathosystem. Co-transcriptomic approaches can simultaneously analyze dual transcriptomes during infection and provide a systematic map of the cross-kingdom communication between two species. Here we used the Arabidopsis-B. cinerea pathosystem to test how plant host and fungal pathogen interaction at the transcriptomic level during infection. We assessed the impact of natural genetic diversity in the pathogen and plant host by utilization of a collection of 96 isolates of B. cinerea infection on Arabidopsis wild-type and two mutants with jasmonate or salicylic acid compromised immunities. We identified ten B. cinerea gene co-expression networks (GCNs) that encode known or novel virulence mechanisms. We constructed a dual interaction network by combining four host-and ten pathogen-GCNs into a single network, which revealed potential connections between the fungal and plant GCNs involving both novel and conserved mechanisms. These co-transcriptome data shed lights on the potential mechanisms underlying host-pathogen interaction and illustrate the continued need for advancements of in planta analysis of dual-species dynamics.