Cloning and Identification of Differentially Expressed Genes Associated with Smut in Sugarcane

The aim of this experiment was to evaluate the molecular mechanism of sugarcane response to the smut pathogen at the beginning of the pathogen infection of sugarcane seedlings, to explore related genes, and to provide useful information for developing rational strategies to control smut at early stages of disease development. A suppression subtractive hybridization library was constructed using cDNA synthesized from RNA extracted from normal stalks as driver and inoculated stalks as tester. The positive clones of the libraries were sequenced randomly, analyzed by BLAST, and classified by GO. A total of 248 positive clones were selected for sequencing, and a total of 224 EST sequences were obtained. In total, 188 ESTs were found to share a considerable homology with known genes, while the remaining 36 ESTs had no homology with known genes. In the Gene Ontology database, the unigenes were assigned functional descriptions; 152, 129, and 139 ESTs were, respectively, involved in cell component, molecular function, and biological process. Some genes related to a smut pathogen infection were obtained, while the SSH library was constructed. These genes reflected the regulation of sugarcane to smut pathogen and can be used as candidate genes.