POLA1 and infection: Key genes, which has been reported to participate in pathogen resistance in other crops, such as PDR (Zm00001eb396340), ABCG36 (Zm00001eb161780) and ABCG43 (Zm00001eb322880) (Aryal et al., 2023; Zhang et al., 2020), exhibited a progressive increase in expression in guard cells with pseudotime values trending toward left, signifying a gradual induction in cells at the infection sites (Figure 4e).