Abstract
Insect pests negatively affect crop quality and yield; identifying new methods to protect crops against insects therefore has important agricultural applications. Our analysis of transgenic Arabidopsis thaliana plants showed that overexpression of PENTACYCLIC TRITERPENE SYNTHASE 1 (PEN1), encoding the key biosynthetic enzyme for the natural plant product (3E)-4,8-dimethyl-1,3,7-nonatriene (DMNT), led to significant resistance against a major insect pest, Plustella xylostella. DMNT treatment severely damaged the peritrophic matrix (PM), a physical barrier isolating food and pathogens from the midgut wall cells. DMNT repressed the expression of PxMucin in midgut cells and knocking down PxMucin resulted in PM rupture and P. xylostella death. A 16S RNA survey revealed that DMNT significantly disrupted midgut microbiota populations and that midgut microbes were essential for DMNT-induced killing. Therefore, we propose that the midgut microbiota assists DMNT in killing P. xylostella. These findings may provide a novel approach for plant protection against P. xylostella.
Data availability
All data generated or analysed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files. Source data files have been provided for Figure 1-6, Figure 1-figure supplement 1, 3-5, Figure 4-figure supplement 2, Figure 5-figure supplement 2, and Figure 6-figure supplement 2-3.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Key Research and Development Program of China (2017YFD0301301)
- Peijin Li
National Key Research and Development Program of China (2016YFD0101803)
- Peijin Li
Natural Science Foundation of China (31670264)
- Peijin Li
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2021, Chen et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 2,976
- views
-
- 696
- downloads
-
- 40
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Volatile DMNT directly protects plants against Plutella xylostella by disrupting peritrophic matrix barrier in midgut
eLife 10:e63938.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.63938
