Fig. 5: Recovery from moderate drought enhanced pathogen resistance in Arabidopsis.
From: Drought recovery in plants triggers a cell-state-specific immune activation
a Overlap between upregulated recovery-specific genes in our bulk RNA-seq data and genes upregulated by different biotic elicitors as reported by Bjornson et al. (2021). For each recovery time point, bars show both the percentage of upregulated recovery-specific genes that are also known to be activated by biotic elicitors as well as the total number. b Bacterial load (log10CFU) of plants that were grown on sterile low-water-content plates and then submerged in a suspension of Pseudomonas syringae pv. tomato DC3000 (Pst DC3000, OD600 = 0.005) or a control solution. Bacterial growth was measured two days post-inoculation, and well-watered controls (W) were compared against plants recovering from either moderate (R-MD) or severe drought (R-SD). For this analysis, we merged two independent experiments for a total of n = 12 per treatment. Significance values were calculated with a two-way ANOVA of treatment and batch, followed by Tukey’s post hoc test. P-values were FDR-corrected. c Representative images of plants taken four days post-inoculation. Red arrowheads point out the infection symptoms. d Bacterial load (log10CFU) of soil-grown plants sprayed with Pst DC3000 (OD600 = 0.05) or a control solution after experiencing moderate drought. Bacterial growth was measured 4 and 24 h post-inoculation and compared against controls using a two-way student’s t-test. We collected 16 leaves (n = 16) to measure bacterial load at the initial time point, and 24 leaves (n = 24) to measure bacterial growth 24 h post infection. e, Representative images of plants taken 14 days post-inoculation. In b and d: ns = P > 0.05, * P ≤ 0.05, **P ≤ 0.01, ***P ≤ 0.001, ****P ≤ 0.0001. Boxplots middle line shows the median, the lower and upper hinges are the 25th and 75th percentile, respectively. The whiskers extend from the hinges to the most distant value within 1.5 * IQR of the hinge, where IQR is the inter-quartile range, or distance between the first and third quartiles.
