Temperature-Inducible Transgenic and in Confer an Enhanced Disease Resistance at Elevated Temperature.

Temperature is one of the most important environmental factors greatly affecting plant disease development. High temperature favors outbreaks of many plant diseases, which threaten food security and turn to be a big issue along with climate change and global warming. Here, we found that concurrent constitutive expression of the key immune regulators and in significantly enhanced resistance to virulent bacterial pathogen pv. at elevated temperature; however, autoimmunity-related growth retardation was also observed on these plants at a normal temperature. To balance this growth-defense trade-off, we generated transgenic plants dual expressing and genes under the control of a thermo-sensitive promoter from the gene, whose expression is highly induced at an elevated temperature. Unlike constitutive overexpression lines, the proHSP70-EP transgenic lines exhibited enhanced resistance to bacterial pathogens at an elevated temperature without growth defects at normal condition. Thus, this study provides a potential strategy for genetic manipulation of plants to deal with the simultaneous abiotic and biotic stresses.