Fig. 8

Identification of A. suturalis candidate effector proteins. a Bioinformatics pipeline for the identification of candidate effectors from A. suturalis. b Molecular characterization of candidate effectors. From left to right: phylogenetic tree, similarity alignment of amino acid sequence, expression levels in different tissues (each data block shows the z-score of FPKM value of the corresponding tissue organ) and number of amino acids. c Cloning and functional analyses of candidates to identify effector activities. Candidate effectors were overexpressed in N. benthamiana by agroinfiltration to determine whether they induce a cell death. d Agrobacterium tumefaciens infiltration assay for screening candidate effectors inducing cell death. Candidate effectors, the cell death-inducing gene INF1, and empty control (GFP) were expressed in Nicotiana benthamiana leaves via agroinfiltration. GFP is used as the negative control, and INF1 is the positive control that induced cell death. There were two injection points on the same leaf, and two independent experiments were performed