Rapid and dramatic transcription reprograming occurs in the resistant rice cultivar Hui1586 challenged with M. oryzae
To gain more details about the M. oryzae-induced DEGs in Nipponbare and Hui1586, we compared DEG overlaps between them at each time point. Large DEG overlaps, especially upregulated DEGs, were observed between the two cultivars at all four time points (Fig. 4A), indicating that a large number of common genes were involved in the transcriptional reprograming between the susceptible and resistant cultivars. As the early time point is crucial for determining the interactions between plant and pathogens (Mine et al., 2018), we performed hierarchical clustering of the DEGs identified at 12 hpi in the two cultivars based on the log2-transformed fold-change value (Supplemental dataset 4). This analysis generated a global view of the expression levels of those DEGs at four time points in Nipponbare and Hui1586. As shown in Fig. 4B, a large portion of DEGs was induced more strongly at 12 h in Hui1586 compared with Nipponbare, suggesting that a faster and stronger activation of transcriptional reprogramming is important for rice efficient defense against M. oryzae .