Enhancement of innate immune system in monocot rice by transferring the dicotyledonous elongation factor Tu receptor EFR

The elongation factor Tu (EF-Tu) receptor (EFR) in cruciferous plants specifically recognizes the N-terminal acetylated elf18 region of bacterial EF-Tu and thereby activates plant immunity. It has been demonstrated that Arabidopsis EFR confers broad-spectrum bacterial resistance in the EFR transgenic solanaceous plants. Here, the transgenic rice plants (Oryza sativa L. ssp. japonica cv. Zhonghua 17) and cell cultures with constitutive expression of AtEFR were developed to investigate whether AtEFR senses EF-Tu and thus enhances bacterial resistance in the monocot plants. We demonstrated that the Xanthomonas oryzae-derived elf18 peptide induced oxidative burst and mitogen-activated protein kinase activation in the AtEFR transgenic rice cells and plants, respectively. Pathogenesis-related genes, such as OsPBZ1, were upregulated dramatically in transgenic rice plant and cell lines in response to elf18 stimulation. Importantly, pretreatment with elf18 triggered strong resistance to X. oryzae pv. oryzae in the transgenic plants, which was largely dependent on the AtEFR expression level. These plants also exhibited enhanced resistance to rice bacterial brown stripe, but not to rice fungal blast. Collectively, the results indicate that the rice plants with heterologous expression of AtEFR recognize bacterial EF-Tu and exhibit enhanced broad-spectrum bacterial disease resistance and that pattern recognition receptor-mediated immunity may be manipulated across the two plant classes, dicots and monocots.