Revealing Different Systems Responses to Brown Planthopper Infestation for Pest Susceptible and Resistant Rice Plants with the Combined Metabonomic and Gene-Expression Analysis

Brown planthopper (BPH) is a notorious pest of rice plants attacking leaf sheaths and seriously affecting global rice production. However, how rice plants respond against BPH remains to be fully understood. To understand systems metabolic responses of rice plants to BPH infestation, we analyzed BPH-induced metabolic changes in leaf sheaths of both BPH-susceptible and resistant rice varieties using NMR-based metabonomics and measured expression changes of 10 relevant genes using quantitative real-time PCR. Our results showed that rice metabonome was dominated by more than 30 metabolites including sugars, organic acids, amino acids, and choline metabolites. BPH infestation caused profound metabolic changes for both BPH-susceptible and resistant rice plants involving transamination, GABA shunt, TCA cycle, gluconeogenesis/glycolysis, pentose phosphate pathway, and secondary metabolisms. BPH infestation caused more drastic overall metabolic changes for BPH-susceptible variety and more marked up-regulations for key genes regulating GABA shunt and biosynthesis of secondary metabolites for BPH-resistant variety. Such observations indicated that activation of GABA shunt and shikimate-mediated secondary metabolisms was vital for rice plants to resist BPH infestation. These findings filled the gap of our understandings in the mechanistic aspects of BPH resistance for rice plants and demonstrated the combined metabonomic and qRT-PCR analysis as an effective approach for understanding plant−herbivore interactions.