Tomato is a major crop suffering substantial yield losses from diseases, as fruit decay at a postharvest level can claim up to 50% of the total production worldwide. Due to the environmental risks of fungicides, there is an increasing interest in exploiting plant immunity through priming, which is an adaptive strategy that improves plant defensive capacity by stimulating induced mechanisms. Broad-spectrum defence priming can be triggered by the compound ß-aminobutyric acid (BABA). In tomato plants, BABA induces resistance against various fungal and bacterial pathogens and different methods of application result in durable protection. Here, we demonstrate that the treatment of tomato plants with BABA resulted in a durable induced resistance in tomato fruit against Botrytis cinerea, Phytophthora infestans and Pseudomonas syringae. Targeted and untargeted metabolomics were used to investigate the metabolic regulations that underpin the priming of tomato fruit against pathogenic microbes that present different infection strategies. Metabolomic analyses revealed major changes after BABA treatment and after inoculation. Remarkably, primed responses seemed specific to the type of infection, rather than showing a common fingerprint of BABA-induced priming. Furthermore, top-down modelling from the detected metabolic markers allowed for the accurate prediction of the measured resistance to fruit pathogens and demonstrated that soluble sugars are essential to predict resistance to fruit pathogens. Altogether, our results demonstrate that metabolomics is particularly insightful for a better understanding of defence priming in fruit. Further experiments are underway in order to identify key metabolites that mediate broad-spectrum BABA-induced priming in tomato fruit.

中文翻译：

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利用代谢组学开发番茄果实引发的免疫系统

番茄是一种主要的作物，因疾病而遭受重大的产量损失，因为收获后水平的果实腐烂可能占全世界总产量的50％。由于杀真菌剂的环境风险，人们越来越关注通过引发来利用植物免疫力，这是一种通过刺激诱导机制提高植物防御能力的适应性策略。化合物ß-氨基丁酸（BABA）可以引发广谱防御启动。在番茄植物中，BABA诱导出对各种真菌和细菌病原体的抗性，并且不同的施用方法可产生持久的保护作用。在这里，我们证明了用BABA处理番茄植株会导致番茄果实对灰葡萄孢的持久诱导抗性，疫疫疫霉和丁香假单胞菌。有针对性和无针对性的代谢组学被用于研究代谢调控，该代谢调控为番茄果实引发致病微生物提供了不同的感染策略。代谢组学分析显示，BABA处理后和接种后发生重大变化。引人注目的是，引发的反应似乎是针对感染类型的，而不是显示出BABA诱导的引发的共同特征。此外，从检测到的代谢标记物进行的自上而下的建模可以准确预测所测得的对水果病原体的抗性，并证明可溶性糖对于预测对水果病原体的抗性至关重要。总之，我们的结果表明，代谢组学对于更好地了解水果中的防御启动尤其有见地。