Small GTP-binding proteins function as regulators of specific intercellular fundamental biological processes. The gene was predicted to encode a protein of amino acids, with a molecular mass of Further analysis revealed the presence of a conserved signature that is characteristic of Rab7, and phylogenetic analysis demonstrated that TaRab7 has the highest similarity to a small GTP binding protein gene BdRab7-like from Brachypodium distachyon.
Quantitative real-time PCR assays revealed that the expression of TaRab7 was higher in the early stage of the incompatible interactions between wheat and Pst than in the compatible interaction, and the transcription level of TaRab7 was also highly induced by environmental stress stimuli.
Furthermore, knocking down TaRab7 expression by virus induced gene silencing enhanced the susceptibility of wheat cv. Suwon 11 to an avirulent race CYR These results imply that TaRab7 plays an important role in the early stage of wheat-stripe rust fungus interaction and in stress tolerance.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Although plants have only four of these families of small G proteins, they have a unique subfamily of Rho GTPases instead of the Ras family.
Rac1, a member of the Rho family, has been shown to play an essential role in the defense of rice against pathogens [2] , [3]. The functions of other superfamilies of small G proteins in plant toward pathogens have not been determined. The Rab proteins belong to the small guanosine triphosphatases GTPases superfamily.
