Spatially Resolved Transcriptomics Reveals Plant Host Responses to Pathogens

Background: Thorough understanding of complex model systems requires the characterisation of processes in different cell types of an organism. This can be achieved with high-throughput spatial transcriptomics at a large scale. However, for plant model systems this is still challenging as suitable transcriptomics methods are sparsely available. Here we present GaST-seq (rid-ssisted, patial ranscriptome uencing), an easy to adopt, micro-scale spatial-transcriptomics workflow that allows to study expression profiles across small areas of plant tissue at a fraction of the cost of existing sequencing-based methods.

Results: We compare the GaST-seq method with widely used library preparation methods (Illumina TruSeq). In spatial experiments we show that the GaST-seq method is sensitive enough to identify expression differences across a plant organ. We further assess the spatial transcriptome response of leaves exposed to the bacterial molecule flagellin-22, and show that with eukaryotic () infection both host and pathogen spatial transcriptomes are obtained.

Conclusion: We show that our method can be used to identify known, rapidly flagellin-22 elicited genes, plant immune response pathways to bacterial attack and spatial expression patterns of genes associated with these pathways.