ABSTRACT
The rice blast fungus Magnaporthe grisea causes one of the most destructive diseases of rice around the world. Significant progresses have been made recently in genomics studies of the fungus, opening new era of the functional genomics which requires to generate a large scale of gene knockout mutants. It has been demonstrated that T-DNA insertional mutagenesis is a powerful tool of functional genomics not only for plants but also for fungi. In this paper, we optimized the conditions for T-DNA insertional mutagenesis of M. grisea using Agrobacterium tumefaciens-mediated transformation (ATMT) approach. We employed the binary vector pBHtl constructed by Dr. S. Kang's laboratory at the Pennsylvania State University, which carries the bacterial hygromycin B phosphotransferase gene (hph) under the control of the Aspergillus nidulans trpC promoter as a selectable marker to transform the conidia of M. grisea. We optimized the conditions for T-DNA insertional mutagenesis including the medium, dosage of hygromycin B, cefotaxime and carbenicillin to select the transformants and inhibit the growth of A. tumefaciens after co-culturing. The dosage to inhibit non-transformants could vary from 200-600microg/mL among different M. grisea isolates so that the optimal dosage of the antibiotics should be decided according to isolates. Rice polished agar medium was found the best selection medium which would facilitate the mutant sporulation and minimize the contamination chance. In average, about 500 transformants could be obtained when transforming 1 x 10(6) spores at the optimum condition, among which 85% had T-DNA insertion detected by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and thermal asymmetric interlaced polymerase chain reaction (TAIL-PCR). Fifteen out of 1520 transformants showed mutation in colony morphology. Within 58 randomly selected mutants, it was found that there were 4 sporulation-decreased mutants, 8 less germination mutants and 9 appressorium defective mutants. Several virulent mutants to C101LAC(Pi-1)and 75-1-127(Pi-9)were also obtained which would facilitate cloning the corresponding avirulence genes.