insights into organspecific pathogen defense responses in plants rnaseq analysis of potato tuberphytophthora infestans interactions background the late blight pathogen phytophthora infestans can attack both potato foliage and tubers although interaction transcriptome dynamics between potato foliage and various pathogens have been reported no transcriptome study has focused specifically upon how potato tubers respond to pathogen infection when inoculated with p infestans tubers of nontransformed russet burbank wt potato develop late blight disease while those of transgenic russet burbank line sp2211 rb which expresses the potato late blight resistance gene rb rpiblb1 do not we compared transcriptome responses to p infestans inoculation in tubers of these two linesresults we demonstrated the practicality of rnaseq to study tetraploid potato and present the first rnaseq study of potato tuber diseases a total of 483 million paired end illumina rnaseq reads were generated representing the transcription of around 30000 potato genes differentially expressed genes gene groups and ontology bins that exhibited differences between the wt and rb lines were identified p infestans transcripts including those of known effectors were also identifiedconclusion faster and stronger activation of defense related genes gene groups and ontology bins correlate with successful tuber resistance against p infestans our results suggest that the hypersensitive response is likely a general form of resistance against the hemibiotrophic p infestanseven in potato tubers organs that develop below ground