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Spinach is one of the most nutritious green-leaf vegetables. In the spinach production, diseases cause a significant loss in both yield and quality. Improving disease resistance is one of the major challenges in spinach breeding. Arabidopsis nucleoporin CONSTITUTIVE EXPRESSER OF PATHOGENESIS-RELATED GENES 5 (CPR5) functions as a negative regulator of plant cell death and immunity as cpr5 mutant exhibits spontaneous cell death and heightened immunity. In addition, CPR5 play a role in trichome development as the majority of cpr5 mutant trichomes are branchless whereas wild type trichomes are often three-branched. In the spinach genome, we identified a homolog of Arabidopsis CPR5, referred to as Spinacia oleracea CPR5 (SoCPR5). To investigate the function of SoCPR5, we introduced SoCPR5 into Arabidopsis cpr5 mutant. Our data showed that both spontaneous cell death and heightened immunity were suppressed in the SoCPR5-transgenic cpr5 mutants, verifying that SoCPR5 functions as its Arabidopsis counterpart in plant cell death and immunity. SoCPR5 also fully restored wild type trichome phenotype of the cpr5 mutant. Our study therefore indicates that the function of SoCPR5 is conserved between plant species and SoCPR5 can be applied for genetic manipulation of plant immunity in spinach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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