Extracellular Vesicle-Mediated Cross-Kingdom RNA Trafficking Between Arabidopsis and fungal Pathogen Botrytis cinerea

Small RNAs (sRNAs) are short non-coding RNAs that mediate gene silencing in a sequence-specific manner. We previously discovered that some sRNAs from eukaryotic pathogens, such as Botrytis cinerea, can be transported into host plant cells and suppress host immunity genes for successful infection (Weiberg et al., Science 2013). We further demonstrate that such cross-kingdom RNAi is bi-directional. Plants can utilize extracellular vesicles to protect and transport sRNAs into fungal cells to silence fungal virulence-related genes as part of its immune responses (Cai et al., Science 2018). Recently, we discovered that fungal pathogen B. cinerea also employ extracellular vesicles to protect and transfer sRNAs, which enter plant cells through clathrin-mediated endocytosis pathway (He et al., Nature Communications, 2023). Furthermore, we found that some plant mRNAs can also be secreted by extracellular vesicles and enter fungal cells to be translated to reduce fungal virulence. Cross-kingdom RNA trafficking has been shown to be broadly present between many interacting organisms.