The plant immunization team at Northwest Agricultural and Forestry University reported that pathogenic fungi regulate the pathogenic mechanism of host immunity by attacking chlorophyre.

Wheat stripe rust caused by Puccinia striiformis f. sp. tritici is a major biological disaster that affects the safety of wheat production and has a devastating harm to wheat production. In general, wheat yield is reduced by 10 ~ 30% in general years, and even no harvest is observed in severe cases.frequent variation of Puccinia striiformis leads to the continuous "loss" of wheat varieties resistance, which is the fundamental reason for the frequent outbreak and epidemic of the disease, and is an international problem in rust control. Therefore, it is of great significance to reveal the basis of pathogenicity variation of pathogens for the development of sustainable and effective control strategies of stripe rust.recently, the plant immunity research team of northwest agricultural and Forestry University published an online report entitled "an effector protein of the wheat strip rust fungus targets chloroplast and suppresses chloroplast function" in the journal Nature communications It is the first time to report the pathogenic mechanism that pathogenic fungi regulate plant immunity by attacking chloroplast, and reveal a new way of infection and pathogenicity by living vegetative parasitic fungi.Dr. Xu Qiang is the first author, Professor Kang Zhensheng and Professor Wang Xiaojie are the co authors.Puccinia striiformis is a living vegetative parasitic fungus, which can not be cultured in vitro and lacks genetic transformation system, so it is difficult to study the pathogenic mechanism of wheat stripe rust by genetic methods.to further reveal the molecular basis of pathogenicity variation of stripe rust, the team took the lead in completing the genome sequencing of stripe rust in the world (Zheng et al., nature communications, 2013).through three years' efforts, we have completed the isolation of haustorium, transcriptome analysis of different development stages and large-scale screening and identification of virulence effectors (Xu et al., molecular plant pathology, 2019).this study reported a specific expression effector PST in haustorium stage of Puccinia striiformis_ The coding protein 12806 contains chloroplast guiding peptide, which can enter into the chloroplast of host plants, interfere with the function of the cytochrome b6f protein subunit taisp (iron sulfur protein) in the photosynthetic system, reduce the photosynthesis of plants, weaken the accumulation of reactive oxygen species mediated by chloroplast and the expression of resistance related genes, and promote the infection and colonization of stripe rust.this study reported for the first time the pathogenic mechanism of plant immunity regulated by pathogenic fungi by attacking chloroplasts of plants, and revealed a new way of infection and pathogenicity by living vegetative parasitic fungi.effector PST of Puccinia striiformis_ 12806 model map of host plant immunity regulation