Abstract: As a biological elicitor, Cryptococcus laurentii can significantly induce resistance to Botrytis cinerea in cherry tomato but the underlying mechanism is still ambiguous. High-throughput sequencing on an Illumina HiSeqTM 4000 platform was used for transcriptome sequencing of cherry tomato fruit treated with C. laurentii or sterile water, and bioinformatic methods were used for gene function prediction. Then the expression levels of some defense-related genes were monitored by real time-quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR). By transcriptome sequencing, it was found that there were a total of 3 141 differentially expressed genes in tomato fruit treated with C. laurentii for 48 h, 1 689 of which were up-regulated while 1 452 were down-regulated. These differentially expressed genes were involved in multiple metabolic pathways, which implied that the inductive effect of C. laurentii on cherry tomato fruit was a collaborative process. Moreover, the RT-qPCR results were consistent with the transcriptome analysis.

Key words: Cryptococcus laurentii, cherry tomato, transcriptomics, real time-quantitative polymerase chain reaction