Evaluating plant growth-defence trade-offs by modelling the interaction between primary and secondary metabolism

Abstract

Understanding the molecular mechanisms behind plant response to stress can enhance breeding strategies and help us design crop varieties with improved stress tolerance, yield and quality. To investigate resource redistribution from growth-to defence-related processes in an essential tuber crop, potato, here we generate a large-scale compartmentalised genome-scale metabolic model, Potato-GEM. Apart from a large-scale reconstruction of primary metabolism, the model includes the full known potato secondary metabolism, spanning over 600 reactions that facilitate the biosynthesis of 182 distinct potato secondary metabolites. Constraint-based modelling identifies that the activation of the largest amount of secondary (defence) pathways occurs at a decrease of the relative growth rate of potato leaf, due to the costs incurred by defence. We then obtain transcriptomics data from experiments exposing potato leaves to two biotic stress scenarios, a herbivore and a viral pathogen, and apply it as constraints to produce condition-specific models. We show that these models recapitulate experimentally observed decreases in relative growth rates under treatment, enabling us to pinpoint the metabolic rewiring underlying growth-defence trade-offs. Potato-GEM thus presents a useful resource to study and broaden our understanding of potato and general plant defence responses under stress conditions.