The caffeoyl-CoA O-methyltransferase gene SNP replacement in Russet Burbank potato variety enhances late blight resistance through cell wall reinforcement

KEY MESSAGE: Metabolic pathway gene editing in tetraploid potato enhanced resistance to late blight. Multiallelic mutation correction of a caffeoyl-CoA O-methyltransferase gene increased accumulation of resistance metabolites in Russet Burbank potato. Late blight of potato is a devastating disease worldwide and requires weekly applications of fungicides to manage. Genetic improvement is the best option, but the self-incompatibility and inter-specific incompatibility makes potato breeding very challenging. Immune receptor gene stacking has increased resistance, but its durability is limited. Quantitative resistance is durable, and it mainly involves secondary cell wall thickening due to several metabolites and their conjugates. Deleterious mutations in biosynthetic genes can hinder resistance metabolite biosynthesis. Here a probable resistance role of the StCCoAOMT gene was first confirmed by an in-planta transient overexpression of the functional StCCoAOMT allele in late blight susceptible Russet Burbank (RB) genotype. Following this, a precise single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) mutation correction of the StCCoAOMT gene in RB potato was carried out using CRISPR-Cas9 mediated homology directed repair (HDR). The StCCoAOMT gene editing increased the transcript abundance of downstream biosynthetic resistance genes. Following pathogen inoculation, several phenylpropanoid pathway genes were highly expressed in the edited RB plants, as compared to the non-edited. The disease severity (fold change = 3.76) and pathogen biomass in inoculated stems of gene-edited RB significantly reduced (FC = 21.14), relative to non-edited control. The metabolic profiling revealed a significant increase in the accumulation of resistance-related metabolites in StCCoAOMT edited RB plants. Most of these metabolites are involved in suberization and lignification. The StCCoAOMT gene, if mutated, can be edited in other potato cultivars to enhance resistance to late blight, provided it is associated with other functional genes in the metabolic pathway network.