Enhanced disease resistance to Botrytis cinerea in myb46 Arabidopsis plants is associated to an early down-regulation of CesA genes.

The cell wall is a protective barrier of paramount importance for the survival of plant cells. Monitoring the integrity of cell wall allows plants to quickly activate defence pathways to minimize pathogen entry and reduce the spread of disease. Counterintuitively, however, pharmacological effects as well as genetic lesions that affect cellulose biosynthesis and content confer plants with enhanced resistance against necrotrophic fungi. This kind of pathogens target cellulose for degradation to facilitate penetration and to generate glucose units as a food source. Our results points towards the existence of a transcriptional reprogramming mechanism in genes encoding cellulose synthases (CesAs) that occurs very soon after Botrytis cinerea attack and that results in a temporarily shut down of some CesA genes. Interestingly, the observed coordinated down-regulation of CesA genes is more pronounced, and occurs earlier, in myb46 mutant plants. In the resistant myb46 plants, pathogen infection induces transient down-regulation of CesA genes that concurs with a selective transcriptional reprogramming in a set of genes encoding structural cell wall proteins and extracellular remodelling enzymes. Together with previous indications, our results favour the hypothesis that CesAs are part of a surveillance system of the cell wall integrity that senses the presence of a pathogen and transduces that signal into a rapid transcriptional reprogramming of the affected cell.