Island Cotton Enhanced Disease Susceptibility 1 Gene Encoding a Lipase-Like Protein Plays a Crucial Role in Response to by Regulating the SA Level and HO Accumulation.

Cotton is one of the most economically important crops, but most cultivated varieties lack adequate innate immunity or resistance to wilt. This results in serious losses to both yield and fiber quality. To identify the genetic resources for innate immunity and understand the pathways for pathogen defenses in this crop, here we focus on orthologs of the central defense regulator 1 (). The full-length cDNA of was obtained by screening the full-length cDNA library of combining with RACE strategy. Its open reading frame is 1848 bp long, encoding 615 amino acid residues. Sequence analysis showed that GbEDS1 contains a conserved N-terminal lipase domain and an EDS1-specific KNEDT motif. Expression profiling indicated that the gene is induced by as well as salicylic acid (SA) treatment. Subcellular localization assays revealed that GbEDS1 is located in the cell cytoplasm and nucleus. Overexpression of in dramatically up-regulated SA and HO production, resulting in enhanced disease resistance to . Silencing of in significantly decreased SA and HO accumulation, leading to the cotton more susceptibility. Moreover, combining the gene expression results from transgenic and silenced-GbEDS1 cotton, it indicated that could activate and expression. These findings not only broaden our knowledge about the biological role of , but also provide new insights into the defense mechanisms of against in cotton.