Professor Yeom Seon-in's Team at Gyeongsang National University Identifies Function of Genes Related to Resistance Against Complex Pest and Disease Damage

Massive Discovery of RLP Gene Families Based on Big Data Transcriptome Networks

Yeom Seon-in, Kang Won-hee Professor

[Asia Economy Yeongnam Reporting Headquarters Reporter Choi Soon-kyung] Professor Seon-in Yeom’s team from the Department of Horticulture, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Gyeongsang National University, and Professor Won-hee Kang’s academic research team at the Agricultural Life Sciences Research Institute announced on the 21st that they have elucidated the functions of genes related to pepper resistance against various pathogens.

Professor Yeom’s team at Gyeongsang National University generated extensive transcriptome big data by studying the interactions between pepper, a Solanaceae crop, and its environment. Based on this, they analyzed a complex expression network using the representative disease resistance gene group, the ‘RLP genes’.

Pepper, a major seasoning vegetable, ranks second worldwide in trade volume among vegetable crops. However, due to climate warming and other factors, damage from pepper blight, plant viruses, and bacteria occurs annually. Recently, damage caused by the foot rot pathogen has become a serious global issue.

Professor Yeom’s team identified the RLP gene family, known to be involved in plant immune responses, in pepper based on its genome information. They analyzed 102 biological stress response transcriptomes, including those caused by the devastating pepper blight pathogen and three types of viruses.

They also constructed a gene expression network based on a large integrated transcriptome dataset to predict the functions of RLP genes and selected key genes resistant to complex pathogens.

To confirm the immune-related mechanisms of the selected key RLP genes, they studied interactions with the pepper blight pathogen, plant viruses, bacterial spot pathogens, and foot rot pathogens. The results revealed that these key genes commonly participate in immune responses conferring resistance to multiple types of pathogens.

Among these, transcriptome analysis using RNA-seq technology is widely used for large-scale gene function analysis by securing the entire set of genes and transcriptomes expressed under various environments and conditions. However, due to the costs required for transcriptome generation and the challenges of analyzing vast data, generating large-scale transcriptomes responding to diverse environmental stresses and integratively analyzing them to elucidate functions has not yet been achieved.

This study goes beyond the conventional concept of discovering a small number of useful genes and demonstrated that constructing gene expression networks based on complex transcriptome life information can be effectively utilized for the large-scale discovery and elucidation of useful genes.

This clarifies how plants respond to environmental stress and is expected to greatly contribute to the development of various stress-adaptive cultivars in the future.

The research results were published online on the 19th in the prestigious scientific journal Horticulture Research (IF 6.793, ranked 1st in horticulture and top 5.74% in plant sciences according to JCR). The study was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea’s Individual Research Project, University Focused Research Institute Support Project, and BK21 Four Agricultural Life Biotechnology Glocal Talent Education and Research Group.

Currently, Academic Research Professor Won-hee Kang and Professor Seon-in Yeom are focusing on developing environmentally stress-resistant cultivars using life information based on genomes and transcriptomes.

Based on this, they have achieved results by discovering and elucidating various environmental stress resistance genes using horticultural crop genomes, publishing their findings in New Phytologist and Scientific Data, contributing to molecular breeding applications.