Currently,the molecular regulation mechanisms of disease-resistant involved in the sheath of maize infected by Banded leaf and sheath blight (BLSB) are poorly known.To gain insight into the transcriptome dynamics that are associated with their disease-resistant,genome-wide gene expression profiling was conducted by Solexa sequencing (Illumina Inc.,San Diego,CA,USA).More than four million tags were generated from sheath tissues without any leaf or development leaf,including 193222 and 204824 clean tags in the two libraries,respectively.Of these,82 864 (55.4%) and 91 678 (51.5%) tags were matched to the reference genes.The most differentially expressed tags with a log2 ratio > 2 or <-2 (P < 0.001) were analyzed further,representing 1476 up-regulated and 1754 down-regulated genes,except for unknown transcripts,which were classified into 11 functional categories.The most enriched categories were those of metabolism,signal transduction and cellular transport.Next,the expression patterns of 12 genes were assessed by quantitative real-time PCR,and the results obtained showed general agreement with the Solexa analysis,although the degree of change was lower in amplitude.In conclusion,we first reveal the complex changes in the transcriptome during the early development of maize sheath infected by R.solani and provide a comprehensive set of data that are essential for understanding its molecular regulation mechanism.And we demonstrate the diterpenoids biosynthesis pathways and GA metabolic pathway were association with maize sheath disease-resistant in response to BLSB;we speculate that High-resistance maize inbred line R15 produces more GA and then response to the BLSB quickly by crosstalk between plant hormonal signaling pathways.