Studies of rice blast resistance gene Pik-H4

Pik-H4 is a rice blast resistance gene that consists of two head-to-head NLR genes. It is well-known that the Pik gene pair functions together challenging rice blast fungus. Except for inducing hypersensitive response, little is known about how NLRs (especially NLR gene pairs) work during immunity. Therefore, we generated transgenic lines that overexpressed Pik1-H4 or Pik2-H4 in susceptible lines Lijiangheituanxingu (LTH) with cassettes PUbi::Pik1-H4::GFP and PUbi::Pik2-H4::GFP. The Pik-H4 LTH near-isogenic line (Pik-H4 NILs) and LTH were also punch-inoculated with M. oryzae that conferred AvrPik-E and sampled at 0, 12, and 24 hours-post-inoculation. All the experiments were performed with three to four-week-old seedlings. About 0.1 g seedlings were sampled for each biological repeat.