The chitin deacetylase PoCda7 is involved in the pathogenicity of Pyricularia oryzae.

Abstract The fungal cell wall plays an essential role in maintaining cellular integrity and facing complex and changing environmental conditions. Whether a fungus successfully invades a host depends on whether it evades the plant's innate immune system, which recognizes the conserved components of the fungal cell wall, such as chitin. Fungi developed infection-related changes in cell wall composition in co-evolution with nature to solve this problem. One of the changes is the deacetylation of chitin by chitin deacetylase (CDA) to produce a polysaccharide that influences the infection of pathogenic fungi. The present study revealed the functions of PoCda7, a chitin deacetylase in Pyricularia oryzae. Phenotype analysis revealed that the knockout mutant of ΔPocda7 had no significant effect on fungal morphogenic development, including conidiation, germination, appressorial formation and cell wall of conidium and hyphae but was sensitive to reactive oxygen species. Glycerols are necessary to generate sufficient turgor in appressoria for invading the host surface. As a result of the decreased appressorium turgor pressure and decreased appressorium-mediated invasion, the fungal virulence of ΔPocda7 was significantly reduced in host plants. PoCda7 inhibited the cell death of leaves in Nicotiana benthamiana. Additionally, the expression of PoCDA7 was repressed in the early stage of infection. Subcellular localization experiments showed that PoCda7 was localized in the cell wall, and its fluorescence transferred to the EIHM and BIC when the rice blast fungus infected the rice leaf sheath, which was referred to as a candidate apoplastic effector in P. oryzae.