Botrytis cinerea is a ubiquitous filamentous fungal pathogen of a wide range of plant species. The fungus is able to infect all aerial parts of its host plants to a certain extent. Infection may cause enormous damage both during plant growth and in the post-harvest phase (during cold storage or transport). B. cinerea is a major cause of economic loss in the production chain of cut flowers, bulb...

Ethylene is often released during plant pathogenesis. Enhanced ethylene biosynthesis by the attacked plant, and formation of ethylene by the attacking pathogen may be involved. We defined the biosynthetic pathway of ethylene in the pathogenic fungus Botrytis cinerea, and characterized the conditions that affect ethylene production in vitro. During the first 48 h of culture the fungus uses methi...

MicroRNAs, as master regulators of gene expression, have been widely identified and play crucial roles in plant-pathogen interactions. A fatal pathogen, Botrytis elliptica, causes the serious folia disease of lily, which reduces production because of the high susceptibility of most cultivated species. However, the miRNAs related to Botrytis infection of lily, and the miRNA-mediated gene regulat...

The plant pathogen Botrytis cinerea can infect undamaged plant tissue directly by penetration of the cuticle. This penetration has been suggested to be enzyme-mediated, and an important role for cutinase in the infection process has been proposed. In this study the expression of the cutinase encoding gene cutA of B. cinerea was analyzed using a cutA promoter-GUS reporter gene fusion. Transforma...

Previous work on the composition of the extracellular matrix of germlings of the plant pathogenic fungus Botrytis cinerea demonstrated the presence of carbohydrate, protein, and simple lipids; which, together, comprised 50-60% of the dry weight. Here we show that most of the remaining mass of the extracellular matrix consists of a chemically inert dark pigment with the electron paramagnetic res...

conclusions expression levels of 1,426 genes were significantly up-regulated in the mutant compared to wt. furthermore, 301 genes were down-regulated with false discovery rates (fdr) of < 0.001 and absolute value of log2 ratio of ≥ 1. results a total of 4,182,944 and 4,182,021 clean tags were obtained from the wt and a nonpathogenic mutant stain (bct89), respectively, and 10,410 differentially ...