Large-scale transcriptome analysis of cucumber and botrytis cinerea during infection

Cucumber gray mold caused by Botrytis cinerea is considered one of the most serious cucumber diseases. With the advent of Hi-seq technology, it is possible to study the plant- pathogen interaction at the transcriptome level. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of RNA-seq to identify cucumber and B. cinerea differentially expressed genes (DEGs) before and after the plant-pathogen interaction. In total, 248,908,688 raw reads were generated; after removing low-quality reads and those containing adapter and poly-N, 238,341,648 clean reads remained to map the reference genome. There were 3,512 cucumber DEGs and 1,735 B. cinerea DEGs. GO enrichment and KEGG enrichment analysis were performed on these DEGs to study the interaction between cucumber and B. cinerea. To verify the reliability and accuracy of our transcriptome data, 5 cucumber DEGs and 5 B. cinerea DEGs were chosen for RT-PCR verification. This is the first systematic transcriptome analysis of components related to the B. cinerea-cucumber interaction. Functional genes and putative pathways identified herein will increase our understanding of the mechanism of the pathogen-host interaction.