PR001006 (Project)

Description:Studies investigating crop resistance to biotic and abiotic stress have largely focused on plant responses to singular forms of stress and individual biochemical pathways that only partially represent stress responses. Thus, combined biotic and abiotic stress treatments and the global assessment of their elicited metabolic expression remains largely unexplored. In this study, we employed targeted and untargeted metabolomics to investigate the metabolic responses of maize (Zea mays) to both individual and combinatorial stress treatments using heat (abiotic) and Cochliobolus heterostrophus infection (biotic) experiments. Ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography-high-resolution mass spectrometry revealed significant metabolic responses to C. heterostrophus infection and heat stress, and comparative analyses between these individual forms of stress demonstrated differential elicitation between the two global metabolomes. In combinatorial experiments, treatment with heat stress prior to fungal inoculation negatively impacted maize disease resistance against C. heterostrophus, and distinct metabolome separation between combinatorial stressed plants and the non-heat stressed infected controls was observed. Targeted analysis revealed inducible primary and secondary metabolite responses to biotic/abiotic stress, and combinatorial experiments indicated that deficiency in the hydroxycinnamic acid, p-coumaric acid, may lead to the heat-induced susceptibility of maize to C. heterostrophus. Collectively, these findings demonstrate that abiotic stress can predispose crops to more severe disease symptoms, underlining the increasing need to investigate defense chemistry in plants under combinatorial stress.