The immune response-enhancing effects of NH1 and NH3 may be associated with their ability to interact strongly with the same subgroup of rice TGA proteins: rTGA2.1, rTGA2.2, rTGA2.3, rLG2, TGAL2, and TGAL4.
Representative samples coming from the 5 subgroups of cultivated rice (ie. indica, tropical japonica, temperate japonica, aus and aromatic) were used to determine the efficiency of the filtered markers in segregating the aforementioned groups.
LRR-RLK is a large subgroup of the rice RLK family, of which, XA21, XA3/XA26 and OsSERK2 have been reported to regulate plant immunity against Xoo, the causal agent of bacterial leaf blight.
Significant probabilities of non-neutral patterns of sequence variation were detected at several loci in one or both subgroups of the cultivated rice (Additional file 3).
Clades exist for almost all WRKY subgroups which consist solely of rice WRKY domains or a combination of rice and Arabidopsis WRKY domains; these clades might be comprised of orthologs of yet unidentified barley WRKY proteins.
Due to presence of this motif, the protein has been previously classified to be a member of Xb subgroup of AP2/ERF proteins of rice (Nakano et al. 2006).
Pairwise comparisons of polymorphic SNPs between pairs of rice accessions from the same subgroup showed an average of 1347 well-distributed SNPs in indica, 1394 SNPs in japonica, and 1413 SNPs in wild populations.
Courtois et al. (2012) has successfully classified two subgroups as japonica and non japonica accessions in European core collection of rice.
In the present study, OsWRKY80, a member of the IIe subgroup protein, has also been identified as a positive modulator of rice resistance to sheath blight.
