Metabolomics navigates natural variation in pathogen-induced secondary metabolism across soybean cultivar populations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Phytophthora soja e-induced root rot poses a major threat to soybean production. While the molecular mechanisms underlying soybean– P. sojae interactions have been extensively studied, their biochemical basis remains largely unexplored. Previous research has identified key metabolic modules involved in pathogen defense, but structural diversity has largely been constrained by studies on single soybean accessions. Here, we broadened the chemical search space to a diverse soybean germplasm collection using high-throughput metabolomics as a powerful tool for comprehensive metabolic profiling. Chemical classes of lipids and phenylpropanoids again retrieved the most pronounced responses upon P. sojae infection in general. A two-layer analytical strategy further finely resolved metabolites into pathogenesis-, resistance-, and tolerance-type accumulation patterns, leading to the identification of cinnamaldehyde and coumestrol as potent defense metabolites. Bioassays validated cinnamaldehyde directly and strongly inhibited cyst germination and mycelial growth, and coumestrol, a benzofuran-type metabolite, exhibited broad-spectrum activity against spore germination as an identified phytoalexin. Multiomics analyses nailed down the candidate of coumestrol biosynthesis genes, and genetically overexpression of regulatory genes ( Dir2a/4a/4b ) in hairy root systems increased coumestrol accumulation thus positively correlating with improved host resistance. Interestingly, tolerance-type compounds may serve distinct ecological roles, as exemplified by daidzein, which, despite being classified as a tolerance-type metabolite, recruits more zoospores facilitating secondary infection in fact. This study highlights a systematic approach for population-level investigations and emphasizes the necessity of integrating bioinformatics with experimental validation to accurately predict metabolite or gene ecological functions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".