Comparison and Validation of Putative Pathogenicity-Related Genes Identified by T-DNA Insertional Mutagenesis and Microarray Expression Profiling in Magnaporthe oryzae

High-throughput technologies of functional genomics such as T-DNA insertional mutagenesis and microarray expression profiling have been employed to identify genes related to pathogenicity in Magnaporthe oryzae. However, validation of the functions of individual genes identified by these high-throughput approaches is laborious. In this study, we compared two published lists of genes putatively related to pathogenicity in M. oryzae identified by T-DNA insertional mutagenesis (comprising 1024 genes) and microarray expression profiling (comprising 236 genes), respectively, and then validated the functions of some overlapped genes between the two lists by knocking them out using the method of target gene replacement. Surprisingly, only 13 genes were overlapped between the two lists, and none of the four genes selected from the overlapped genes exhibited visible phenotypic changes on vegetative growth, asexual reproduction, and infection ability in their knockout mutants. Our results suggest that both of the lists might contain large proportions of unrelated genes to pathogenicity and therefore comparing the two gene lists is hardly helpful for the identification of genes that are more likely to be involved in pathogenicity as we initially expected.