Abstract:To explore the common response mode and disease resistance mechanism of tea plants (Camellia sinensis) to pathogenic stress, bioinformatics methods were used to extract, integrate and function enrich of multiple sets of RNA-seq data, and the main regulatory molecules and protein interaction modules were analyzed by combining various tools and database resources. This results showed that the expression of cytochrome P450 family members in tea plant was significantly up-regulated under the fungal pathogen stress. The metabolic processes of steroid and hormone, and phenylpropanoid synthesis pathway were activated, and the biological processes, such as mitotic cell cycle regulation, DNA methylation and photosynthesis pathway were inhibited. The major regulatory molecules, such as WRKY and NAC transcription factors, the RLK-Pelle and CAMK family of kinases were mainly up-regulated. The differentially expressed protein interaction modules showed that the modules involved in mitotic cycle regulation, microtubule motion-based, starch and sucrose metabolism, cell wall polysaccharide synthesis, photosynthesis, flavonoid metabolism were down-regulated, while lignin synthesis and terpenoid biosynthesis were up-regulated. There may be interactions between modules. The key genes in lignin and terpenoid synthesis pathways activated by pathogen stress included ferulic acid-5-hydroxylase gene (F5H), peroxidase gene (POD) and terpenoid synthase gene HMGR. Cytochrome P450 gene might play a key role in fungus stress of tea plants. Enhancing the synthesis of lignin and terpenoids, and weakening photosynthesis might be the core modes of tea plants responding to fungus stress.
