Plant–Fungal Interactions: Laser Microdissection as a Tool to Study Cell Specificity

Abstract

In the past 20 years, laser microdissection (LMD) technology has been widely applied to plant tissues, allowing to obtain new information on the role of different cell-type populations during plant development and interactions, including plant–pathogen interactions. The application of a LMD approach allowed verifying the response of plant and pathogen during the progression of the infection in different cell types, focusing both on gene expression in host plants and pathogens. Here, a protocol to apply the LMD approach to study plant and fungal transcript profiles in different cell-type populations is described in detail, from the biological material preparation to RNA extraction and gene expression analyses.