Kiwifruit has high nutritional, medicinal and economic value. However, it is susceptible to various adverse conditions during its growth and development, including biotic and abiotic stresses. The leucine-rich repeat receptor-like proteins (LRR-RLPs) have been identified in several plants and have been found to play important roles in growth and development, signal transduction and stress response. However, its study in kiwifruit has received limited attention.

Plant Bioinformatics Research Group of Wuhan Botanical Garden has analyzed the LRR-RLP genes in kiwifruit, encompassing the identification of gene family members, their physicochemical properties, phylogenetic relationships, and chromosomal positions, and determined their expression levels under biotic and abiotic stress.

The results showed that at the same time point, the number of differentially expressed LRR-RLPs in 'Huate' kiwifruit was more than that in 'Hongyang' kiwifruit. Additionally, the expression level of several genes in ' Hongyang' kiwifruit did not change significantly, but showed a significant trend of change in 'Huate' kiwifruit, including Actinidia39875.t1, Actinidia35026.t1, Actinidia12020.t1 and Actinidia34764.t1. Furthermore, there were 27, 31 and 20 differentially expressed LRR-RLPs genes under heat stress, waterlogging stress and copper stress, respectively, indicating that LRR-RLPs was involved in the resistance process of kiwifruit to abiotic stress.

This study indicates that kiwifruit LRR-RLPs play important roles in both biotic and abiotic stress responses, and also provides important basis for further elucidating the molecular mechanisms of plant immunity and breeding kiwifruit varieties with enhanced resistance.

The research entitled "Genome-Wide Identification and Expression Analysis of Kiwifruit Leucine-Rich Repeat Receptor-Like Proteins Reveal Their Roles in Biotic and Abiotic Stress Responses” was published in International Journal of Molecular Sciences. CAO Yingying is the first author, and Professor ZHANG Xiujun and LI Li are the corresponding authors.

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the International Science and Technology Cooperation Program of Hubei Province, the Key Research and Development Program of Hubei Province, the National Science & Technology Innovation Zone Project.