Protein translation is regulated in rice early defense responses to M. oryzae
GO enrichment and KEGG pathway analysis were performed to determine the functional classification and pathway assignment of the shared DEGs at 12 h in both cultivars. Remarkably, among the 3398 M. oryzae- upregulated genes (Fig. 4A), the “ribosome” pathway was strikingly enriched in the KEGG analysis and GO terms related to protein translation, including “ribosome biogenesis”, “ribosome assembly”, “rRNA processing”, “protein folding” and “tRNA metabolic” were significantly enriched in the GO analysis (Fig. 4C and Supplemental table 1). Within the rice genome, ribosome-related and rRNA-related genes accounted for ~2% and less than 0.5%, respectively. However, nearly 10.0% and 1.7% of the 3398 genes were ribosome- and rRNA-related (Fig. 4D and Supplemental dataset 5), respectively, showing that the two GO terms were enriched in this group. However, ribosome- and protein translation-related pathways were not enriched in DEGs at 24, 36 and 48 hpi (Supplemental table 1). Hierarchical clustering of ribosome- and rRNA- related genes showed that most of them were upregulated at 12 h but not at later time points (Fig. 4E). Notably, the induction of these genes was much higher in the resistant Hui1586 than the susceptible Nipponbare (Fig. 4E). Together, these results indicated that the regulation of the protein translation is involved in rice early defense responses to M. oryzae .