Polysaccharide Peptide-Induced Virus Resistance Depends on Ca2+ Influx by Increasing the Salicylic Acid Content and Upregulating the Leucine-Rich Repeat Gene in Arabidopsis thaliana.

Plant viral diseases cause severe economic losses in agricultural production. The development of biosource-derived antiviral agents provides an alternative strategy to efficiently control plant viral diseases. We previously reported that the exogenous application of polysaccharide peptide (PSP) exerts significant inhibitive effects on Tobacco mosaic virus infection in Nicotiana tabacum. In this study, we studied in additional detail the mechanism by which PSP can induce virus resistance in Arabidopsis thaliana. We found that PSP significantly induced Ca2+ influx and increased the accumulation of hydrogen peroxide and salicylic acid (SA) in the A. thaliana cells. A gene with a toll interleukin 1 receptor-nucleotide binding site-leucine-rich repeat domain (LRR) was obtained by RNA sequencing in combination with the screening of the gene-deletion mutants of A. thaliana. The LRR gene was deleted, and the inductive response of A. thaliana to PSP was significantly attenuated after mutation. After the heterologous overexpression of the LRR gene in N. benthamiana, the SA content and PR1 gene expression in N. benthamiana were significantly increased. Through analyses of the LRR gene expression and the ability of A. thaliana to resist Cucumber mosaic virus following the treatments of PSP and PSP + ethyleneglycol-bis (beta-aminoethylether)-N,N'-tetraacetic acid, it was shown that PSP enhanced the virus resistance of A. thaliana by inducing Ca2+ influx and subsequently improving expression of the LRR gene, which further increased the SA content.