Codon Optimization Enables the Geneticin Resistance Gene to Be Applied Efficiently to the Genetic Manipulation of the Plant Pathogenic Fungus Botrytis cinerea

Abstract

Botrytis cinerea can infect almost all of the important horticultural crops and cause severe economic losses globally every year. Modifying candidate genes and studying the phenotypic changes are among the most effective ways to unravel the pathogenic mechanism of this crop killer. However, few effective positive selection markers are used for B. cinerea genetic transformation, which limits multiple modifications to the genome, especially genes involving redundant functions. Here, we optimized a geneticin resistance gene, BcNPTII, based on the codon usage preference of B. cinerea. We found that BcNPTII can greatly increase the transformation efficiency of B. cinerea under G418 selection, with approximately 30 times higher efficiency than that of NPTII, which is applied efficiently to transform Magnaporthe oryzae. Using the gene replacement method, we successfully knocked out the second gene BOT2, with BcNPTII as the selection marker, from the mutant ΔoahA, in which OAHA was first replaced by the hygromycin resistance gene HPH in a field strain. We obtained the double knockout mutant ΔoahA Δbot2. Our data show that the codon-optimized BcNPTII is an efficient positive selection marker for B. cinerea transformation and can be used for various genetic manipulations in B. cinerea, including field wild-type strains.