RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Only 2 of 12 now-deleted genes of 19 identified and predicted Myb family DNA binding proteins are directly involved in rice Magnaporthe oryzae pathogenicity JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 2021.12.28.474317 DO 10.1101/2021.12.28.474317 A1 Ya Li A1 Xiuxia Zheng A1 Mengtian Pei A1 Mengting Chen A1 Shengnan Zhang A1 Chenyu Liang A1 Luyao Gao A1 Pin Huang A1 Stefan Olsson YR 2022 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/04/17/2021.12.28.474317.abstract AB Proteins with DNA binding Myb domains have been suggested to be involved in regulating development and stress responses in Eukaryotes. Magnaporthe oryzae is considered the most destructive fungal pathogen of rice, and we screened the genome for all genes encoding proteins containing Myb domains since these could be essential during pathogenesis. We found 19 genes Myb1-19. Only a few have previously been investigated, and one has been shown to be involved in pathogenesis. We tried to delete the other 18 genes and succeeded with 12. RT-qPCR showed that all 19 genes are expressed with different expression profiles during pathogenesis. Only deletions of the genes encoding proteins MoMyb2, MoMyb13, and MoMyb15 showed growth, conidiation, or infection phenotypes, indicating that they are singly needed for successful infection. Even more important, the lack of phenotypes for 9 mutants surprised us, and we extended the analysis to expression co-regulation of all 19 Myb proteins and found 5 co-regulated groups of predicted Myb-domain proteins. We point to likely compensatory regulations of other genes compensating and hiding the effect of many deletions. Further studies of the Myb-family genes are thus of interest since revealing their functions with a possible effect on pathogenicity could be targeted for future measures to control M. oryzae in rice.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.