Study on Fusarium graminearum infecting Arabidopsis thaliana

The fungal pathogen Fusarium graminearum causes head blight disease on cereal crops world widely.To further dissect the molecular mechanism underlying the fungus-cereal crops interaction,we here used F.graminearum to inoculate Arabidopsis thaliana.Our results showed that spraying conidial suspension on A.thaliana at the early flowering stage could cause disease symptoms on floral tissue and siliques of plants.Then the hyphae spreaded into the whole plants and caused the plants to death eventually.The invasion of F.graminearum was further confirmed by tissue staining and PCR amplification with specific primers of the fungus.Our results also suggested that A.thaliana could be used to study the pathogenesis of F.graminearum,which will facilitate the resistant gene screening for cereal head blight disease.