Tomato Transcription Factors Regulate Defence Response Against Biotic Stresses

Abstract

Tomato is one of the most economically important vegetable crops throughout the world. However, it is affected by a panoply of different pathogens that reduce yield and affect product quality, causing symptoms including wilts, leaf spots/blights, fruit spots and rots. Tomato diseases are mainly caused by fungi, but also by oomycetes, bacteria, viruses, viroids and nematodes. The study of plant-pathogen system in tomato arises as an ideal system for better understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying disease resistance, offering an opportunity of improving yield and quality of the products. Among several genes that have been identified in tomato response to pathogens, we highlight those encoding the transcription factors (TFs). TFs are considered central components of plant innate immune system and basal defence in diverse biological processes. They act through sequence-specific interactions with cis-regulatory DNA elements in the promoters of genes and are key regulators of tomato defence response against a wide array of pathogens linked to important diseases, together with a complex cross-talk between different signal transduction pathways. Here we discuss recent studies of tomato TFs regarding defence responses to biotic stresses. Hence, we focus on the identification and role of different families of TFs selected for their abundance, importance, and the availability of functionally well-characterized members in response to pathogen attack. Genes that encode TFs as master regulators of stress-related genes offer extended possibilities related to their use for engineering pathogen resistance in tomato plants, arising as candidates for tomato breeding, taking advantage of the newly emerging molecular techniques applied to plant breeding in the genomics and genome editing era.