FIGURE 4.

Induction of target rice gene expression upon infection with Xoo wild type strains and Xoo Roth X1-8 expressing single artificial TALEs. Unclustered heat maps were created using Heatmapper and rice gene expression is displayed via row Z-scores. Individual rice genes are labeled with their locus identifier (middle), gene name and putative function (left). The right column indicates TALE classes with target boxes in the respective rice promoters. White stars mark the presence of a TALE class member in the different Xoo strains. (A) TALE-mediated gene induction analyzed via RNAseq with RNA sampled 24 h after inoculation of Nipponbare. Z-scores were assigned to arithmetic means of resulting RNAseq reads of the three replicates and displayed in shades of red. (B) Gene induction level analyzed via qRT-PCR with RNA sampled 48 h after inoculation of Nipponbare. The wild type Xoo strain Roth X1-8 does not contain any TALEs. Z-scores of relative RNA abundance were assigned to arithmetic means of two biological replicates using log₁₀ fold changes of gene expression in samples compared to mock treatment and displayed in shades of red. Actin was used as a reference gene.