Fusarium graminearum possesses virulence factors common to fusarium head blight of wheat and seedling rot of soybean but differing in their impact on disease severity
Fusarium graminearum is a toxigenic fungal pathogen that causes Fusarium head blight (FHB) and crown rot on cereal crops worldwide. This fungus also causes damping-off and crown and root rots at the early stage of crop development in soybean cultivated in North and South America. Several F. graminearum genes were investigated for their contribution to FHB in cereals but no inherent study is reported for the dicotyledonous soybean host. In this study we determined the disease severity on soybean seedlings of five single gene disrupted mutants of F. graminearum, previously characterized in wheat spike infection. Three of these mutants are impaired on a specific function as the production of deoxynivalenol (DON, Delta tri5), lipase (Delta Fgl1), and xylanase (Delta xyl03624), while the remaining two are MAP kinase mutants (Delta FgOS-2, Delta gpmk1), which are altered in signaling pathways. The mutants that were reduced in virulence (Delta tri5, Delta Fgl1, and Delta FgOS-2) or are avirulent (Delta gpmk1) on wheat were correspondently less virulent or avirulent in soybean seedlings, as shown by the extension of lesions and seedling lengths. The Delta xyl03624 mutant was as virulent as the wild type mirroring the behavior observed in wheat. However, a different ranking of symptom severity occurred in the two hosts: the Delta FgOS-2 mutant, that infects wheat spikelets similarly to Delta tri5 and Delta Fgl1 mutants, provided much reduced symptoms in soybean. Differently from the other mutants, we observed that the Delta FgOS-2 mutant was several fold more sensitive to the glyceollin phytoalexin suggesting that its reduced virulence may be due to its hypersensitivity to this phytoalexin. In conclusion, lipase and DON seem important for full disease symptom development in soybean seedlings, OS-2 and Gpmk1 MAP kinases are essential for virulence, and OS-2 is involved in conferring resistance to the soybean phytoalexin.