Identification of propranolol and derivatives that are chemical inhibitors of phosphatidate phosphatase as potential broad-spectrum fungicides.

Plant diseases cause enormous economic losses in agriculture and threaten global food security, and application of agrochemicals is an important method of crop disease control. Exploration of disease-resistance mechanisms and synthesis of highly bioactive agrochemicals are thus important research objectives. Here, we show that propranolol, a phosphatidate phosphatase (Pah) inhibitor, effectively suppresses fungal growth, sporulation, sexual reproduction, and infection of diverse plants.

The genome of the rice variety LTH provides insight into its universal susceptibility mechanism to worldwide rice blast fungal strains.

The widely used rice variety Lijiangxintuanheigu (LTH) shows a universal susceptibility to thousands of isolates, the causal agent of devastating rice blast, making LTH an ideal line in resistance () gene cloning. However, the underlying genetic mechanism of the universal susceptibility has not been fully revealed because of the lack of a high-quality genome. Here, we took a genomic approach together with experimental assays to investigate LTH's universal susceptibility to rice blast.

The MoPah1 phosphatidate phosphatase is involved in lipid metabolism, development, and pathogenesis in Magnaporthe oryzae.

As with the majority of the hemibiotrophic fungal pathogens, the rice blast fungus Magnaporthe oryzae uses highly specialized infection structures called appressoria for plant penetration. Appressoria differentiated from germ tubes rely on enormous turgor pressure to directly penetrate the plant cell, in which process lipid metabolism plays a critical role. In this study, we characterized the MoPAH1 gene in M.