Figure 5.

Viability of wild-type and RNA interference defective strains subjected to nutrient deprivation conditions. Cells were cultured in liquid medium, either replete or lacking a specific nutrient, for certain number of days and then spread on TAP-agar plates to assess survival as colony forming units. Values shown are the average of three independent experiments ± SD and are normalized to those of the control strains under each trophic condition. Maa7-IR44s, CC-124 strain containing a transgene expressing FLAG-tagged AGO3; Mut-20, TSN1 deletion mutant, in the Maa7-IR44s background, defective in sRNA biogenesis¹⁴; Gluc(1x), wild type strain derived from CC-124; ago3-1, AGO3 disrupted mutant, in the Gluc(1x) background, defective in RNA interference²⁸. (A) Cell survival of the indicated strains grown mixotrophically (TAP) or photoautotrophically in the presence (HS) or absence (HS − N) of nitrogen for 3 or 18 days. Samples marked with an asterisk are significantly different (p < 0.05) in a two tailed Student’s t-test. (B) Cell survival of the indicated strains grown mixotrophically for 18 days in nutrient replete medium (TAP) or lacking phosphorus (TAP-P) or sulfur (TAP-S). (C) Cell survival of the indicated strains grown photoautotrophically for 18 days in nutrient replete medium (HS) or lacking phosphorus (HS-P) or sulfur (HS-S).