In the studies conducted as part of the doctoral dissertation, a resistant and a susceptible hop cultivar were artificially inoculated with the phytopathogenic fungus Verticillium nonalfalfae and the profiles of phenolic compounds and fungal colonization were determined at different sampling times after inoculation. We observed a bimodal pattern of colonization in the roots of the susceptible cultivar and the fungus spread to the stems, while the relative amount of fungus in the resistant cultivar decreased over the course of the experiment. In the roots of the resistant cultivar, a significant increase in total flavanols was observed on the third day after inoculation. In the stems, the accumulation of phenolics was higher in the susceptible cultivar than in the resistant cultivar as a significant increase in flavonols was observed on days 3 and 15 and in hydroxycinnamic acids on day 6 after inoculation. A study on the identification, characterization, phylogenetic, and expression analyses of three Argonaute genes, two Dicer-like protein genes and two RNA-dependent RNA polymerase genes in hops showed that they clustered with their orthologues from Cannabis sativa, Morus notabilis and Ziziphus jujuba. We found that AGO2 was significantly downregulated in both cultivars at day 3 post-inoculation, which may result in reduced post-transcriptional gene silencing mediated by AGO2-bound small RNAs. We also observed decreased expression of AGO7 in the susceptible cultivar on day 1 post-inoculation and decreased expression of RDR6 in the resistant cultivar on day 3, the latter possibly indicating suppression of biogenesis of trans-acting siRNAs. In a study of miRNA in hop, we identified 56 known and 43 novel miRNAs. In response to V. nonalfalfae infection, we detected changes in the expression of five known and two novel miRNAs in the susceptible cultivar and six known miRNAs in the resistant cultivar. The differentially expressed miRNAs silence 49 transcripts involved in protein localization and pigment synthesis in the susceptible variety, whereas they are involved in transcription factor regulation and hormone signaling in the resistant cultivar.
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