Evaluation of suitable reference genes for normalization of quantitative real-time PCR analysis in rice plants under Xanthomonas oryzae pv.oryzae--infection and melatonin supplementation

Exogenous melatonin(MT)was found to be an interesting tool for enhancing the resistance of rice to Xanthomonasoryzaepv.oryzae(Xoo)-caused bacterial blight(BB).However,the accurate comparison of the expression levels across samples was a challenging task.In this work,the stability of 10 common used housekeeping genes under Xoo-infection and MT supplementation in rice was analyzed using quantitative real-time PCR(qRT-PCR),and algorithms geNorm,NormFinder and BestKeeper.Our results indicated that most reference genes remained stable in Xoo-infected rice plants,while a number of reference genes were affected by MT supplementation.Among all studied genes,the transcript levels of 18S(18S ribosomal RNA)and UBC(Ubiquitin-conjugating enzyme E2)remained unaltered by Xoo infection,while UBC and UBQ5(Ubiquitin 5)were the most stable genes when examining simultaneous Xoo-infection and MT supplementation,demonstrating that UBC is a suitable reference gene for qRT-PCR data normalization in rice under Xoo-infection and MT supplementation.