| Summary: | Temperature is one of the most important environmental factors greatly affecting plant disease development. High temperature favors outbreaks of many plant diseases, which threaten food security and turn to be a big issue along with climate change and global warming. Here, we found that concurrent constitutive expression of the key immune regulators <i>EDS1</i> and <i>PAD4</i> in <i>Arabidopsis</i> significantly enhanced resistance to virulent bacterial pathogen <i>Pseudomonas syringae</i> pv. <i>tomato</i> at elevated temperature; however, autoimmunity-related growth retardation was also observed on these plants at a normal temperature. To balance this growth-defense trade-off, we generated transgenic plants dual expressing <i>EDS1</i> and <i>PAD4</i> genes under the control of a thermo-sensitive promoter from the <i>HSP70</i> gene, whose expression is highly induced at an elevated temperature. Unlike constitutive overexpression lines, the proHSP70-EP transgenic lines exhibited enhanced resistance to bacterial pathogens at an elevated temperature without growth defects at normal condition. Thus, this study provides a potential strategy for genetic manipulation of plants to deal with the simultaneous abiotic and biotic stresses.
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