bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.03.21.436112; this version posted March 22, 2021. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. 1 Two interacting transcriptional coactivators cooperatively control plant 2 immune responses 3 4 Huan Chen1,2, Min Li2, Guang Qi2,3, Ming Zhao2, Longyu Liu2,4, Jingyi Zhang1,2, Gongyou Chen4, Daowen Wang3, 5 Fengquan Liu1, and Zheng Qing Fu2 6 7 1Institute of Plant Protection, Jiangsu Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Jiangsu Key Laboratory for Food Quality and 8 Safety-State Key Laboratory Cultivation Base of Ministry of Science and Technology, Nanjing, China 9 2Department of Biological Sciences, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA 10 3State Key Laboratory of Wheat and Maize Crop Science and College of Agronomy, Henan Agricultural University, 11 Zhengzhou 450002, China 12 4School of Agriculture and Biology/State Key Laboratory of Microbial Metabolism, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 13 Shanghai 200240, China 14 15 Correspondence:
[email protected];
[email protected] 16 17 Abstract 18 The phytohormone salicylic acid (SA) plays a pivotal role in plant defense against biotrophic and 19 hemibiotrophic pathogens. Genetic studies have identified NPR1 and EDS1 as two central hubs in 20 plant local and systemic immunity. However, it is unclear how NPR1 orchestrates gene regulation and 21 whether EDS1 directly participates in transcriptional reprogramming. Here we show that NPR1 and 22 EDS1 synergistically activate Pathogenesis-Related (PR) genes and plant defenses by forming a 23 protein complex and co-opting with Mediator.