# Global expression patterns of *R*-genes in tomato and potato
## Original Publication
von Dahlen JK, Schulz K, Nicolai J and Rose LE (2023) Global expression patterns of *R*-genes in tomato and potato. Front. Plant Sci. 14:1216795. doi: 10.3389/fpls.2023.1216795
## Abstract
The study explores how resistance genes (R-genes) in tomato and potato plants respond to pathogen infection by analyzing the expression of 940 R-genes across 315 transcriptome libraries. Results show that most R-genes are expressed at low levels, with a subset showing moderate to high expression across various conditions, regardless of infection. This subset includes NRCs (NLR required for cell death). About 10% of R-genes were differentially expressed during infection, with both up- and down-regulation patterns. Tissue-specific expression emerged as a key factor influencing R-gene activity. The findings challenge the belief that R-gene expression is primarily induced by pathogen attack, suggesting instead that a core set of R-genes is constitutively active, providing plants with a constant state of readiness for defense.
The study explores how resistance genes (R-genes) in tomato and potato plants respond to pathogen infection by analyzing the expression of 940 R-genes across 315 transcriptome libraries. Results show that most R-genes are expressed at low levels, with a subset showing moderate to high expression across various conditions, regardless of infection. This subset includes NRCs (NLR required for cell death). About 10% of R-genes were differentially expressed during infection, with both up- and down-regulation patterns. Tissue-specific expression emerged as a key factor influencing R-gene activity. The findings challenge the belief that R-gene expression is primarily induced by pathogen attack, suggesting instead that a core set of R-genes is constitutively active, providing plants with a constant state of readiness for defense.
Publicly available datasets were analyzed in this study. A total of 315 transcriptome datasets of tomato (Zouari et al., 2014; Du et al., 2015; Barad et al., 2017; Sarkar et al., 2017; Sugimura and Saito, 2017; Xue et al., 2017; Yang et al., 2017; Zheng et al., 2017; Chen et al., 2018; Shukla et al., 2018; Fawke et al., 2019; Pesti et al., 2019; Wang et al., 2019b) and potato (Goyer et al., 2015; Zuluaga et al., 2015; Dees et al., 2016; Gao and Bradeen, 2016; Kochetov et al., 2017; Levy et al., 2017; Li et al., 2017; Lysøe et al., 2017; Hao et al., 2018; Kumar et al., 2018) were obtained from the Sequence Read Archive (Figure S1).